Financial services organizations have been slow to embrace cloud computing, but adoption has slowly been gaining momentum over 2011 and is expected to pick up pace this year. Hedge funds, in particular, are set to invest more in virtualization, which could shake up their infrastructure teams.

Recruiters Robert Half recently surveyed around 100 CIOs and 77% of them intended on migrating some technology functions – including storage, data centres, networks, servers and applications – on to the cloud this year.

In the financial sector, hedge funds are particularly likely to adopt cloud computing strategies this year. This is starting to filter through the recruitment requirements, says Paul Wright, manager at Robert Half Technology.

“People with virtualization and cloud experience will be in particular demand as hedge funds continue to push their infrastructure out to the cloud,” he says. “As a result, security is a primary concern for CIOs. In fact, 84% of CIOs surveyed indicated they are at least somewhat concerned about cybersecurity.”

Cloud computing isn’t necessarily a positive innovation for the tech teams within banks and hedge funds. As we’ve pointed to previously, most financial services firms are looking to the cloud to save the cost of buying expensive hardware, and some functions within IT – notably infrastructure, application maintenance and support systems – could be downsized.

In the case of hedge funds, while redundancies would be avoided if possible, the role of the infrastructure team could be shaken up, suggests Nick Finlay, head of investment management at Hays Finance Technology.

“Cloud computing is undoubtedly among the top three priorities of hedge funds’ CTOs this year,” he says. “However, I don’t think this will necessitate any extra headcount. In most cases, hedge funds are using external consultancies or outsourcing the work. What this means, however, is that infrastructure professionals will have to become more savvy at managing relationships with external suppliers.”

One of the most publicised suppliers of cloud computing infrastructure is Amazon’s EC3, but the likes of Terremark and Rackspace are also providing competition.

Investment banks are yet to start advertising for roles specific to cloud computing, but it’s still popping up in job descriptions. Increasingly, banks are asking for ‘technical leadership’ around cloud computing and virtualization when recruiting network engineers and architects.