AMP, the Australia and New Zealand-based wealth manager, has selected Collaborative Online Services, one of the cloud computing services provided by the US technology firm CSC.

Collaborative Online Services' cloud – meaning web - based email and collaboration system which is based on Microsoft’s Exchange, Office Communication Server and SharePoint products and is hosted locally on an Australian virtual computing environment.

There are strategic plans afoot at AMP for the firm to make increased use of cloud-based services and its adoption of COS has been chosen as the first implementation to further this aim.

"For the past 18 months, AMP has been exploring strategies to increase the use of cloud-based services. Starting with low-risk services, we embarked upon a multi-vendor pilot for e-mail and collaboration services as our first production services to move to the cloud," said Sharmini Sivathas, AMP’s IT director of service management.

"Financial benefits were a key consideration for us, along with inter-operability with our current environment, and confidence in our chosen service partner. The Microsoft product suite, the COS solution and delivery by our long-standing IT partner CSC are key components of AMP's technology roadmap."