TECHNOLOGY
‘IRELAND IS LEADING THEWORLD IN CLOUD ADOPTION, AND RIGHT NOWUP TO 1,000
ability to focus onwhat differentiates your business.CEOs,CFOs andCIOs owe it to their shareholders to take a hard look at their technology infrastructure andmake sure it’s really differentiated and adding value…as it’s likely costing thema lot ofmoney.” Also speaking at the Cloud Summit wasDrGilesHogben of
ENISA, a renowned expert on cloud computing. I put it to him that one of the biggest fears preventing SMEs fromadopting the cloud is fear over data integrity. Is this well founded? “We did a survey of SMEs including this question and found
that although this is among the top concerns, loss of control over data is the greatest fear.As for data integrity,you have to ask your- self whether data integrity would be better protected in the cur- rent SME set-up or moved into a cloud provider that can, in many cases, affordmuch better integrity protectionmeasures. “Again, it depends on the application. For highly real-time
applications such as gaming and financial transactions, there can be issues of maintaining integrity across highly distributed sys- tems, but these will hit you even if you keep these solutions in- house (but you might have better control and visibility to deal with them).”
COST AND FLEXIBILITY
Despite the concerns over security, it is clear that cost and flexi- bility will win out. Research from Citrix found that interest in cloud computing is growing. In an independent survey of more than 700CIOs worldwide, close to half said they intend to imp- lement virtualisation to aid cloud-computing efforts. Niall Gilmore, country manager of Citrix in Ireland, cautions
that moves towards cloud computing are still some time away, especially while questions such as ownership of data in the cloud and whose role it is to ensure compliance remain unresolved. “Itwill be at least two years before the internet-based comput-
ing model will gain traction in the Irish market place,” says Gilmore. Francis O’Haire, technical director with the technology dis-
tributorData Solutions, says one of the advantages of virtualisa- tion is that it offers short-term benefits, while also making IT infrastructuremore ready to bemoved to the cloud in the future. “Organisations can benefit fromthe economics and flexibility
of cloud computing within their own private cloud through vir- tualisation and this enables themto scale ormigrate this out to a public-cloud infrastructure when the time is right or the need arises,” saysO’Haire. More than half of European CIOs are unfamiliar with cloud
computing and this is a factor that is prohibiting its growth. The rate of adoption of cloud computing is directly linked to
levels of knowledge about cloud services, according to a report published by COLT, a leading European provider of managed services and business communications. “This research clearly shows that formany ITdecisionmakers
cloud computing is integral to their strategies; however, it is con- cerning to see that 56pc of respondents have said that they are not familiar with cloud computing,” says Maggy McClelland,
34 OWNER MANAGER VOL 3 ISSUE 4 2010
SOFTWARE APPS ARE BEING USED AND TESTED BY IRISH FIRMS’
managing director of COLT Managed Services. “There’s a lot of hype around cloud and this can blur the real
facts. It falls to trusted advisers to inform CIOs and senior IT decision makers about its potential benefits. “The opportunity is clear: exponential growth of cloud serv-
ices will happen, but only if the industry makes large strides in improving levels of knowledge amongst IT decision makers,” McClelland says.
CLOUD BUSTER Glossary of cloud-computing jargon
CLOUD APP: A software application that sits on the internet, not on a local PC
CLOUD BROKER: An entity that creates and maintains relationships with multiple cloud-service providers
CLOUD: A metaphor for a global network, first used in reference to the telephone network and now commonly used to represent the internet
CLOUD CENTRE: A large internet company, such as
Amazon.com, Microsoft or Google, that provides businesses with infrastructure via the web
CLOUD COMPUTING: A networking solution in which every- thing fromcomputing power to infrastructure, applications, business processes and collaboration are delivered as a service anytime, anywhere
CLOUD SERVICE: The delivery of software, infrastructure or storage that has been packaged, automated and delivered online
CLOUD SOURCING: Replacing traditional IT services with cloud services
CLOUDSTORMING: Connecting multiple cloud-computing environments
PRIVATE CLOUD: An internal cloud that sits behind an organisation’s firewall. The cloud can be managed by that company’s IT department, which can then offer cloud services to workers
PUBLIC CLOUD: A cloud-computing environment that is open for use by the general public. For example, Gmail, Hotmail, and even Facebook
SOFTWARE AS A SERVICE (SAAS): Software services avail- able over the internet to organisations’ workers such as CRM databases via
Salesforce.com
STORAGE AS A SERVICE: The ability to host and retrieve pri- vate data securely online – for example,
Amazon.com’s S3
SOFTWARE PLUS SERVICES: Combining hosted services with capabilities that are best achieved with locally running software, for example Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Standard Suite (BPOS).
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52