Cloud computing has largely moved beyond its early adopter stage and is now ready for mainstream consumption.
Although it is not the solution for every computing application, especially for mission critical applications in large enterprises, there are numerous applications for cloud computing both in the large enterprise as well as in small and medium-sized organisations. At an event earlier this month IBM unveiled its offering in the cloud space to the South African market.
Werner Linderman, vice president of global technology services for IBM Sub-Saharan Africa, explained that IBM’s strategic offering is composed of three core areas: smarter computing, business analytics and cloud computing.
Although the company has been offering private cloud services to its customers for some time now, this launch brings the first enterprise class catalogue service to SA. A catalogue service means that companies can pick from a variety of services that are pre-configured and therefore it is possible for them to be up and running in a relatively short space of time, without having to worry about issues such as licences and infrastructure.
IDC’s Mark Walker, speaking at the launch, said that there is now a much greater adoption of cloud computing as a service that is vital to the enterprise. He explained that research done by IDC in 2010 found that cloud computing was not on the agenda of the CIO.
However, the same research, just a year later, found that not only was cloud computing now firmly on the agenda but also that that the concept of cloud computing has diverged to where cloud computing and cloud services are considered two separate areas of the market. This is an indication of the growing maturity of the market.
He predicted that 2012 would be a banner year for cloud adoption, not only in South Africa, but also across the African continent. This observation was somewhat surprising as local bandwidth remains constrained on the continent. What is not surprising is the amount of money being spent on cloud services already.
Walker said that in 2010, more than $21-billion was spent on cloud services and it is expected that by 2015, $1 out of ever $7 spent on packaged software will be spent on cloud services.
The sector that is most aggressively adopting cloud computing is the telecommunications sector as it offers not only increased internal efficiencies, but also an increased bouquet of services that can be delivered to their clients. Financial services companies have been slower to the market as they have much greater concerns over client privacy and security than many other organisations.
Linderman explained that IBM’s cloud offering was formulated to address some of the key concerns of their customers. These included cost containment, with clients looking to use the cloud computing model to reduce the cost of providing services.
The other area that is critical to business users is the area of security. Because public cloud computing services are provided on infrastructure that is shared among all the users, there is naturally concern that the security of vital company information might be compromised. Providing this kind of confidence is vital to any successful public cloud offering.
The IBM offering will encompass the broad scope of cloud computing services, including cloud-based infrastructure services, allowing companies to run their own software on systems in the IBM cloud. This might be used for testing and development systems where the hardware requirements are both variable and limited in time.
In addition the company will be offering a Smart Mailbox, Smart Backup and an archiving solution, allowing companies to take some of the more troublesome aspects of technology and use the infrastructure that IBM has put in place to remove the headache that these areas often provide.
He said that these services would be run out of the IBM data centres in South Africa, while other offerings would be hosted in IBM’s data centres in Germany, where they are already up and running. He added that with services like archiving the field is changing rapidly as companies that previously needed to archive data for two or three years now look to retain data for 20 or 30 years.
The additional demands placed on organisations requiring these kinds of long-term storage solutions mean that cloud-based services provide the ideal solution to this challenge. He adds that with companies spending an increasing amount of their IT budget on storage, this is a critical cost factor that needs to be brought under control.
He said that CIOs are currently spending about 70% of their budget on storage and the amount of data generated by companies has been doubling every two years over recent times and this is now moving to closer to every 18-months.
This article originally appeared in the Mail & Guardian newspaper as a sponsored feature