“The interesting thing about cloud computing,” says Hrusostomos Vicatos, head of strategy and innovation at Cybernest, “is many people have different opinions on what the benefits are.”
Vicatos was speaking at the ITWeb Virtualisation and Cloud Computing conference in Bryanston, yesterday.
He said today's CIOs have a dilemma. There is a continuous demand for IT, despite increased financial pressure and growing compliance and governance importance. “It's very costly to comply,” he added.
Vicatos also said increasing energy costs, continuous technology change and complexity, as well as the skills shortage keep CIOs up at night. “Managing IT skills is a concern for most CIOs.”
According to Vicatos, the promise of cloud is that it allows users to provision resources as and when needed, make migration easier, be more cost-efficient, and have improved automation and management.
“The promise of cloud has been there a long time,” he noted, and there was always concern over security, certification issues and lack of standards.
The reason cloud is relevant now, explained Vicatos, is that the frameworks are more complete and more mature. The components to give a user software-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service and infrastructure-as-service are all available.
Security is one of the key concerns, he said, but added that many companies in SA are not even aware of their current insecurity and vulnerabilities. "A virtual desktop is more secure."
Standards bodies have formed for virtualisation, and due to its ubiquity, there are lower barriers to entry. Vicatos noted that while rolling out all the systems is a significant outlay, an organisation only needs to deploy a small number initially.
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