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Technology

Industry experts: private cloud is where the action is

By Jianggan Li | 13 November 2009

Cloud computing has been drawing attention from public sector organisations, as well as the IT industry. To many, the paradigm is no longer dismissed as conceptual hype, but a too-good-to-miss opportunity to save money, energy and be more efficient.

Databases, security and even application acceleration may soon be provided as a service. “In the future, IT must be approached as reusable and flexible architecture,” Lim Chin Keng, Director of Field System Engineering, F5 Networks Asia Pacific, told FutureGov.

William Wu, Regional Group Manager, Intel Asia Pacific, affirmed that neither the public nor private cloud is new. However, the time is ripe for organisations to reap greater benefits from both cloud types, he said. He believes a cloud should have three basic attributes: dynamic provisioning, energy saving and optimisation.

“It’s another way to look at enterprise networks,” says Teddy Ko, Head of Solutions at Datacraft Asia. “A private cloud is a private network, from which we can now get better tools to enable and manage our IT function.”

“Predecessors of cloud computing didn’t take off because the user experience was not there and the management tools were not fantastic,” says CK Lam, Enterprise Solutions Manager, Asia Pacific of Juniper Networks. “Now I am convinced that it will take off. The economic advantage is just huge.”

The elements of IT infrastructure transformation people have been talking about, including consolidation, virtualisation and automation, are all basic blocks of a private cloud, many industry players reckon.

“Private cloud is where the action is,” said Vasanthan Dasan, Cloud CTO of Sun Microsystems. “Especially for public sector organisations. Private clouds not only enable IT infrastructure to continuously evolve, but also prepare them for the wider application of cloud architecture.”

Management tools now allow IT infrastructure administrators to have a clear view of where all the applications and data reside in a virtualised environment. Migration of such resources can also be conducted seamlessly.

“Virtualisation really allows software applications and storage to be scalable,” says Intel’s Wu. Virtual LAN, virtual routers, virtual firewalls, virtual deskop infrastructure. “Technology now enables you to virtualise all the way,” says Juniper’s Lam.

“For enterprises, the demand will spur infrastructure upgrades, whether it’s from a service provider or the internal IT department,” Lam adds, who reckons that while security is a top concern for public cloud, it is ultimately a trust issue.

Intel’s Wu says that while a clear legal framework, together with policies and standards, is not yet in place, “there is no reason for a government to move everything to a public cloud”.

Juniper’s Lam is cautious about the “pay per use” model. He reckons that organisations need to be careful about the total cost. “You need to have a clear idea about what your usage is going to be,” he says. “Otherwise you might end up spending much more, just like we do with telephone.”

He stresses that in addition to regulatory and compliance laws, security and privacy concerns and availability of mission critical applications, another constraint for cloud computing is interoperability and portability.

Efforts have been forged by industry to create common understanding and standards around cloud computing.

The open cloud manifesto, supported by a myriad of industry players, such as EMC, IBM, Red Hat and Sun Microsystems, aims to establish a set of core principles around cloud-based technologies.

The cloud security alliance was also formed this year to “promote the use of best practices for providing security assurance within cloud computing, and provide education on the uses of the cloud to help secure all other forms of computing”.

Sun Microsystems is also involved in a number of initiatives to build common standards. “Public clouds are still at an early stage for large enterprises and the public sector,” says Dasan. “But activities within private clouds have already drawn a promising picture for the paradigm.”

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