Industry association TM Forum says the ECBC has been established to help "understand the needs of the largest global cloud buyers and ensure any impediments to the uptake of cloud technology are removed".

Other members include Alcatel-Lucent, Amdocs, AT&T, BT, CA, Cisco, EMC, HP, IBM, Microsoft, Nokia Siemens Networks, Telecom Italia and Telstra.

The council has identified several areas they will work on, including common cloud services product definitions, security issues, interoperability, data portability, APIs, service provider benchmarking and network performance and latency issues.

Eric Pulier, executive director, ECBC, says: "The ECBC represents an opportunity to affect the global information technology marketplace, bringing transparency and efficiency to the relationship between buyers and sellers. By lowering the gating factors for widespread adoption of cloud services, the ECBC can accelerate the shift to the next era in computing."

Phil Dance, MD, Adastral Park, BT Group, adds: "The nature of cloud services needs vendors, communications and service providers and industry bodies to design and build services and components that work together in a seamless cloud environment."

A survey from TechMarketView for vendor Temenos in the summer found that despite the hype cloud computing has yet to gain real support among banks, many of which are concerned about the security and potential risks of a technology they view as immature.

The poll of around 45 executives showed that banks accept the potential to save money associated with cloud computing, with nearly half of survey respondents seeing the technology as a means to cut infrastructure costs and over a third saying it would give more cost flexibility.

Yet only 15% of respondents were tapping the technology with a third admitting they simply don't know enough about the potential risks and 44% citing the lack of data security as a significant barrier to adoption.