IT managers urged to favour open cloud

IT managers urged to favour open cloud

IT managers have been encouraged to favour cloud computing solutions that keep their options open, rather than tie them in to proprietary technology.

Ed English, EMEA marketing director at Dell, told Techworld that failing to do so could risk undoing a lot of good work that has been accomplished over the past decade when it comes to enabling open standard solutions that are not dependent on a vendor.

He explained: “Companies and IT managers alike have worked very hard to drive more flexibility and more interoperability into the data centre. It started at the desktop level, but it’s now permeating the data centre as well. There is this big shift from proprietary to open.”

Moving into private cloud solutions that work on technology that locks the user into a specific storage or network vendor risks creating a “situation where the trend ticks back a little bit”.

However, as cloud systems develop, things are likely to change and the establishment of regulations governing this area of communication should help to swing things in the favour of customers. In the mean time, IT managers will need to be careful about which areas of business they move to the cloud and which they choose to keep back on company-owed servers.

Organising the system effectively should help businesses to benefit from the resilience of cloud computing, along with the opportunity it brings to scale computing power up and down as required, while protecting the company as far as possible from sending too much of their data across to a proprietary system.

Businesses looking to move services into the cloud, should evaluate the performance of their existing network and consider setting up a leased line or MPLS network.