FOCUS CLOUD DISCUSSIONS
Issue 15, April/May
DATACENTER DISCUSSIONS
FOCUS gives two leading cloud experts the opportunity to ask each other questions on the future of their businesses and the industry
Savvis and Sungard Availability Services are two of the world’s biggest providers of colocation, outsourcing and cloud services. FOCUS brought together Neil Cresswell, EMEA MD, Savvis and Keith Tilley, MD UK and Executive Vice President Europe for SunGard Availability Services.
DCDFOCUS started off the discussion with an easy question addressed to both.
Q. DCDF: HOW CAN CLOUD COMPUTING PROVIDE GREATEST VALUE UP THE BUSINESS STACK?
A. KEITH TILLEY: From SunGard Availability Services’ perspective, the cloud should enable organisations to gain access to a secure, reliable, enterprise class Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offering that has resilience and availability baked in. Such a solution then enables customers to meet the ever increasing availability demands of their organisations without having to make increasing levels of heavy capital expenditure. All this should leave the customer organisation in full control of their IT.
Q. NC: We all know that one of the main reasons enterprises are resistant to cloud is because they feel physically uncomfortable keeping data in external premises and are unconvinced of its security benefits. How are you addressing this and what can we do as cloud providers to develop a sense of trust between businesses?
A. KT: Any third party supplier of infrastructure and/or data availability solutions has a mandate to ensure the logical, physical and technical security required to protect customers’ confidentiality and information.
But the responsibility for ensuring appropriate security is a shared one: The providers must help clients cut through the hype to see both the benefits and challenges that cloud offers and to develop appropriate infrastructures that will mean a customer’s data is safe and accessible. Thus providers must demonstrate their trust worthiness and be experienced partners who can deliver ROI and advise customers on the right technology investments to make And the client organisations need to really ascertain if their potential cloud solution truly is enterprise-class by asking vendors the same questions they always would with regards to IT tech. Careful consideration of a vendor a priority.
Q. KT: What issues do you feel need to be addressed that will ease main-stream adoption of cloud IaaS for the enterprise marketplace?
A. NC: Many organizations are hesitant to jump into mass-market cloud offerings mainly because of concerns focussing on the privacy and security of data and performance of cloud-based applications. However, this has recently been addressed with the arrival of enterprise-class cloud options.
In order to move towards the Cloud successfully, IT organizations need to carefully plan the transition. Enterprises evaluating cloud services must understand the policy implementation mode they are buying into and the need to have a detailed understanding of decision-making policies across resources, applications and operations – and then make sure that cloud helps them optimize. In particular, cloud computing raises important policy and governance issues that must be well-understood if the cloud is to provide the benefits it promises.
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www.datacenterdynamics.com
KEITH TILLEY
Managing Director UK and Executive Vice President Europe
SunGard Availability Services
NEIL CRESSWELL
Managing Director Europe Middle East and Africa
Savvis
Another advantage that SunGard sees is that companies can put their own IT environments into cloud supplier facilities – whatever size, shape and flavour those environments might be – whilst attaining interoperability between hosted and cloud environments (not all environments are suited to cloud). Enterprise customers with their own data centres should also be able to interact securely with SunGard’s cloud environment. Similarly, customers’ cloud environments can interact securely with hosted SunGard environments.
A. NEIL CRESSWELL: An obvious business benefit with cloud computing is that we are able to closely couple business demand to IT Opex since using a cloud platform virtually eliminates the need for capital expenditure to start a new business service or expand an existing business service. This allows businesses to operate in a more entrepreneurial style performing market testing without the constraints of acquiring a significant budget to even begin preliminary work on a new business.
This sort of agility and mobility to scale projects up and down is an important capability for people to have in the existing market conditions.
Q. NC: Alongside security, there are corporate governance concerns about adopting cloud computing, such as the need to retain data in local markets and provide facilities for legal discovery. How can the cloud computing industry allay these concerns?
A. KT: A common international interface and strategy, supported by separate in-country interfaces means that providers can enable their customers to enjoy the benefits the cloud provides, whilst being able to meet specific legal jurisdictions that may apply within given territories.
However, as before, the responsibility for this sits on both sides. Companies need to become more granular in their approach to their data, as they often tend to apply a broad approach to what governance is required and in our experience not all data is equal. Thus, just as SunGard helps customers assess the availability requirements of their different tiers of data, consultancy is also needed and recommended to aid companies in assessing the specific security requirements of the data that they hold.
Q. KT: Do you think the economic climate has affected the longer-term supply of new-build data center facilities?
A. NC: IT leaders are now rising to the challenge to deliver ‘more for less’ and are motivated to challenge the status quo, exploring ways to improve operational efficiencies. This is an opportunity for organizations to adopt new technologies in an effort to become more efficient.
The economic climate has motivated the industry to only build data centers where it is absolutely necessary. In fact, a large percentage of organizations are now consolidating their in-house IT infrastructure, reviewing their IT costs and are looking at infrastructure outsourcing as a means of delivering first-class IT support to the organization.
Q. NC: The UK government has been purported to be ‘too slow’ on cloud adoption. It was reported that the public sector - because of its reluctance to change current IT infrastructure- was making unnecessary redundancies and missing out on the possibility of saving up to £4 billion a year. What are your thoughts?
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