Cloud computing will only take off in SA once the country has reliable high-speed broadband.
This is the view of Greg Hatfield, GM of voice solutions at Internet Solutions, speaking at the ITWeb Virtualisation and Cloud Computing conference at The Forum, in Bryanston, yesterday.
Hatfield said high-speed reliable broadband networks from Seacom and the East Africa Submarine Cable System (Eassy) will encourage local businesses to turn to third-party service providers to host their data on outsourced infrastructure in order to cut costs.
“Cheaper bandwidth is not necessarily what makes or breaks cloud computing,” noted Hatfield. “But it does provide reliability, which cloud computing is completely dependent on, in terms of business continuity. Cloud computing will only take off in SA once we have reliable bandwidth.”
According to Hatfield, the biggest benefits for businesses in outsourcing their infrastructure and applications to a hosted third-party provider is cloud computing's ability to drive business agility and flexibility, as it is on-demand, scalable and cost-effective.
However, Hatfield warned that cloud computing doesn't come without risk. “An organisation moving into a cloud environment accepts a certain amount of risk because of the outsourcing aspect of cloud computing.”
He indicated that rules and regulations defining data responsibility between the organisation and the third-party service provider is unclear and needs to be clearly defined.
“Forrester talks about the uneven handshake because there's still a lot of responsibility the enterprise needs to take that the service provider will not be able to deliver. Not everything can be done remotely, which remains a challenge to the cloud architecture,” said Hatfield.
According to research by Symantec, there needs to be a healthy discussion with the business and service provider around the risks and benefits of using cloud services based on data classifications.
Justin Somaini, Symantec chief information security officer, says in a statement that certain data might be considered too sensitive to release to a third party, based on business risk.
According to the Gartner CIO 2010 Agenda, cloud computing ranked as the number two priority internationally as a way for CIOs to reduce upfront costs. However, the research firm found South African CIOs have not placed cloud computing as part of its top five technology focus for 2010.
Gartner says that by 2012, 20% of businesses will own no IT assets. The firm explains that cloud services today tend to be standardised, elastic, but in chunks, and monolithic in nature. Gartner says the future market for cloud computing will look nothing like the market of 2009.
“In four years' time, smaller service providers will federate horizontally to gain economies of scale. There will be more choices at each layer of cloud computing and standards will gain momentum,” it says. “Monolithic providers will not go away, but they will be surrounded by more agile, focused competitors who rely on standards for interoperability.”
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