Cloud-Based Solutions Bring Support, Sales, Tech, & Compliance Jobs

Lower-level product support, sales lead, and implementation personnel are needed at a growing number of cloud-based platform and solutions providers to deal with banks and i-banks, as well as hedge funds. A number of tech companies, like InData, are actively recruiting for implementation and product support people to work with the buy-side.

Software engineers are also in demand on the front-end and applications side at places like InvestLab, as they roll out new financial technology platforms. Meanwhile, Thomson Reuters and Portware are teaming up to offer cloud-based algorithmic trading solutions. New ventures, like this one, are going to be looking not only for IT engineers, but especially for client services and sales people as the ventures come online.

The big "whoa nellies" in this horserace continue to be reliability, security, privacy, compliance and regulatory issues. The recent and well-publicized cloud crash at Amazon-taking customer data with it-certainly didn't allay any fears. Financial firms, for the most part, are keeping cloud-based services limited to less sensitive information.

Without a vote of 100 percent confidence, the industry is thinking of ways to best deal with the operational risks. And this growing fear is a very good thing for jobs. IT-savvy compliance, operational risk, and regulatory personnel are in demand, as banks and investment firms kick it up a notch in their policies and policing efforts. Senior architect and IT developer spots are appearing in regulatory and compliance divisions at some of the major banks, like Bank of America. They're charged with shepherding cloud-based infrastructure initiatives.

While banks and investment firms work to "get over" their fears with cloud-based applications, most financial services firms are still conceding to the inevitable shift. One big signal came earlier this month, when the commercial technology arm of the NYSE Euronext announced the launch of a cloud-based tech platform for financial services firms.