Cloud computing is likely to cut enterprise dependence on internal IT departments, especially in smaller and medium businesses.
This is according to David Ives, IS Partners GM for business intelligence and knowledge management, who will speak at the upcoming ITWeb Virtualisation and Cloud Computing Summit in Johannesburg.
However, he believes larger enterprises will likely retain a core internal IT team as cloud computing gains ground.
Ives says as cloud computing goes mainstream, smaller enterprises will start to reduce their dependence on internal IT functions.
“This is already outsourced. E-mail, Web, conferencing and even CRM and ERP functions can be sourced in the cloud.” However, he says, customised applications are more difficult to outsource.
“The breadth of offerings is not there yet. For enterprises, their custom-built applications will remain supported by the internal IT team; continuing the development and support of this.”
Ives adds that in theory, it could be possible for an enterprise to place its entire IT infrastructure in the cloud with the support and technologies currently available.
However, he says: “This depends on how much you are willing to spend. If the spend in telecoms is sufficient, with good mechanisms to check and ensure that systems can run independently of communication or on redundant lines, then yes it can be done.
“But if companies do not up their investment in the network and there are major challenges on contention of traffic, how the network is configured and massive dependencies on the throughput required, it will be difficult to take the full infrastructure to the cloud.”
That being said, he explains that many multinationals have their full applications hosted in offices offshore - like Microsoft, which supports the complete EMEA region from its office in Ireland. The local team, as well as the West, East and Central African team, access all their systems remotely. This includes CRM, ERP and e-mail on all online systems, he adds.
“The biggest challenge is sufficient bandwidth. An area of growth that we are seeing is insight into IT infrastructure and communications. With the burgeoning spend on IT, effective IT management is not available with the current vendors in the market.
“The ability to collect data and analyse incidents and utilisation, as well as predict IT service challenges, is critical in the cloud. For example, Microsoft SA logs generate 4GB of data per day on a relatively medium-sized network. Identifying what users are utilising and wastage is a keen area to improve on.”
Ives will discuss how enterprises are using cloud computing during his talk at the ITWeb Virtualisation and Cloud Computing Summit on 27 July at The Forum in Bryanston. For more information, click here.
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