Go forth and cloudify: BMC

Beverley Head
Tuesday, 16 February 2010 10:08

Business IT - Technology

Organisations worried about sending data and applications to the cloud should worry less, code more and go forth and cloudify according to Jim Grant, vice president of strategy and corporate development for enterprise management firm BMC Software.

Recent acquisitions such as Phurnace Software and Tideway are adding to the company’s ability to develop and sell tools that allow IT departments to automate not only the management of IT infrastructure, but increasingly the management of applications.

Speaking with iTWire from the US, Grant acknowledged that while cloud computing was an area of growing interest among enterprises, there was lingering concern about where the data centre underpinning the cloud was physically located. Grant, who attended the World Economic Forum in Davos last month, said this was a theme explored in the technology sessions at the conference.

Companies all over the world were subject to different regulatory controls - particularly over privacy issues – which influenced where they could store and process data, he said.

While he acknowledged that “The CIA will never let its database be run in India,” he  still believes that there are cloud services offered from India that the CIA could use.

What organisations needed to do he said was automate the management of their applications, establishing coded rules to direct which processing was conducted where.

As suppliers of cloud based services continued to build networks of data centres around the world which allowed them to ‘follow the sun’, so enterprises should be able to set up automated tools that would pick from that network where their data and applications were stored and managed.