Cloud ecosystem emerges

Beverley Head
Wednesday, 14 September 2011 15:40

Technology Feature - Cloud Computing

An entire cloud ecosystem is emerging in Australia with companies setting up shop to offer cloud building tools, cloud platforms, cloud brokering and cloud consulting - what's still missing though are cloud standards to avoid lock in.

At a media roundtable event held in Sydney today organised by VMware - which is now selling tools starting at $300 a month to allow even the smallest private clouds to be constructed - participants pointed to the rise of the hybrid cloud model, where users curated a variety of public and private cloud services to meet their needs.  Increasingly end users are working with industry partners to help navigate the different cloud services and models on offer.

However Rob Livingstone, a consultant and author of Navigating through the Cloud, warned that despite the range of different clouds now on offer it was; 'Not simple to switch clouds,' given the lack of agreed standards and companies also needed to remain mindful of the hidden write offs that might accompany a move to the cloud if an organisation still had significant amounts of legacy systems in operation.

He also warned that unless organisations were running 'rock solid vanilla offerings the public cloud is quite limiting,' Instead organisations were turning to hybrid solutions and working with a range of different companies now offering cloud related services to orchestrate those cloud solutions.

Nicki Periera, general manager of ZettaGrid which offers infrastructure as a service, said this was particularly attractive to the SME sector which liked the cost predictability that cloud models delivered but wanted to harness the flexibility they promised.

'This is bringing certainty to uncertainty,' he said. 'It is saving them money in upfront capital costs. SMBs work on cashflow and they have the ability to react and execute as required. We can commission a machine in 20 minutes.'

Commissioning a cloud however isn't as simple as turning on a tap for a drink of water, and paying the bill according to what you use. Companies for example need to remain mindful of the need for disaster recovery and business continuity in the event of either a cloud outage, or an inability to access the cloud over communications networks; and how different clouds can work together so that data from one application hosted on one cloud can be made available to an application which may be running elsewhere.