Solving security issues 'will boost cloud development'

Solving security issues 'will boost cloud development'

Development of cloud computing is likely to expand once the security issues have been ironed out, it has been suggested.

Simon Piff, associate vice-president for enterprise infrastructure research at IDC Asia-Pacific, suggested that businesses are still hesitant about switching to the cloud because they are worried about security.

However, service reliability, data location, sovereignty and vendor support were also shown to be hampering the switch. But once these problems have been ironed out, businesses are likely to welcome cloud computing as a mainstream service in the enterprise market by 2015, the IDC survey of companies in Asia-Pacific excluding Japan revealed.

Mr Piff confirmed that the main concerns preventing enterprise from moving towards the cloud are already being addressed. In the case of service reliability and uptime, for example, public cloud users are becoming more and more aware of the implications of its use and are making plans to ensure a smooth delivery.

Improving networks by introducing leased lines or managed networks can also help to balance out concerns regarding cloud computing adoption.

However, before things really get off the ground in this region, Doug Gourlay, vice-president of Arista Networks, stated that there needs to be a change in mindset and companies must accept that “cloud is not enterprise”.

He explained that there is a typical mindset among businesses of building a single IT infrastructure and “praying” that it will continue to work. but cloud computing needs to be approached in a different manner. Companies need to “build it, deploy, fail quickly, then learn from the mistakes and deploy again; there needs to be constant innovation in this space”.

Fortunately, this means that there is also the facility for constant innovation, allowing a single IT system to evolve as a business requires it.