My paranoia last month may have been justified. I wrote about the Occupy London protesters wanting to camp out near the London Stock Exchange (LSE) and the cyber-attacks between Israeli and Arab hackers as harbingers of more trouble to come. It looks as if not only was I was right but there needs to be a renewed vigilance to fend off what is likely to be a steady flow of terrorists and hackers targeting financial centers, trading venues and financial services firms.

(Editor’s note: FTF News is launching today a new area of coverage as we spotlight each month a key information technology (IT) trend that is proving to be crucial to the successful operation of middle and back office processes. For January, we focus on the eXtensible Business Reporting Language, also known as XBRL.)

The open and free eXtensible Business Reporting Language, or XBRL, has been permeating the financial services industry because of the efficiencies it offers to manual, error-prone and often expensive financial processes. In fact, XBRL has become a way of life for more than 8,000 companies that file XBRL-formatted financial statements. Many hope that XBRL can also serve as a catalyst for more automation of corporate actions processing.

FTF News is pleased to announce that nominations are now open for the FTF News Technology Innovation Awards 2012. Nominations can be made by any registered subscriber to FTF News (subscription is free). Nominations close on January 31, 2012 and will then be considered by the editorial panel before a final short-list is presented for voting. To make a nomination, please click on the link below and complete the nomination page.

Rarely am I enthusiastic about bureaucratic standards-building processes. But a recent task force report gives me hope that international support for a system of legal entity identifiers (LEIs) is real and will help bring to fruition a key reform for over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives. Of course, this isn’t the sexy reform that grabs the headlines, but bear with me.

Financial services firms are prepared to spend money on cloud computing for disaster recovery/business continuity (DR/BC), email and mobile computing as many of them foresee clouds in their futures. But they are reluctant to move key middle and back office functions to the cloud as concerns over security have spiked in the year since FTF News first asked its readership about cloud computing.