Spire Research and Consulting’s CEO Leon Perera was privileged to deliver the first Opening Plenary address at CloudAsia 2014 held in Singapore on 29-30 October. He shared key insights from Spire’s study on Cloud computing usage in Singapore’s financial services industry (FSI) and recommended approaches to increase Public Cloud usage in the FSI. At the Opening Plenary of CloudAsia 2014, Leon Perera, CEO of Spire Research and Consulting shared that some Financial Institutions operating in Singapore were already using the private Cloud for non-core applications. However the study found that Financial Institutions were hesitant to further explore Public Cloud adoption for core applications involving production data. The study recommended approaches to increasing Cloud usage for core applications through the creation of prescriptive codes of conduct for FI-vendor contracting as well as security. The study concluded that an opportunity currently exists for a multi-stake-holder