Google logoUnder a similarly alarming headline ("Google persuades Spanish bank BBVA to use the cloud"), the BBC News website broke a story about Madrid's BBVA Bank switching it's office applications to Googles' cloud apps - GDocs, GMail, calendars, spreadsheets and so on. Read the full story over at the BBC News site.

Importantly, this is not Google breaking into the banking sector (see how far "do no evil" gets you there, boys):
"Spanish banking giant BBVA is switching its 110,000 staff to use Google's range of enterprise software."

This is the biggest deal yet for Google cloud computing services and could herald a whole new phase of Google as a cloud services vendor. 110,000 seats is not to be dismissed.

The banking sector has stringent regulations on security, so BBVA will have to keep Google applications separate from customer data. Quite how this is to be achieved technically remains to be seen. Data tends to 'leak' across applications, no matter how many times management insists that Google's tools be used "only for internal communication." Read more of this post