UniCredit S p A : European banks join forces on public cloud usage

UniCredit and a number of other financial institutions have formed the European Cloud User Coalition (ECUC) to ensure and enable secure cloud applications for the European financial industry as a whole. This will be achieved by setting joint security standards and best practices within the EU.

On that basis, it will be easier to enforce the high European regulatory and data protection standards also with non-European cloud providers. As a result, financial institutions will in the long-term be more independent in their technology selection, thus strengthening competition.

The ECUC's primary objective is to develop a joint position on common challenges and solutions with Cloud Services Providers. As a first step, ECUC will publish a paper with requirements for cloud services during 2021. The paper will consider all aspects of the basic European regulation and the data localisation provision, including General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requirements.

Cloud computing is important for the digital transformation of the European financial sector. In addition to private cloud solutions, widely used to date, new public cloud solutions offer additional flexibility and scalability, as well as high-quality security standards and resilience.