Corporate cloud adoption still faces obstacles

Stephen Withers
Monday, 27 September 2010 11:13

Business IT - Technology

An industry executive has outlined some of the obstacles slowing the corporate adoption of cloud computing.

Organisations adopting cloud computing - whether internal, external or hybrid - still face a number of problems, according to Herb VanHook, vice president of strategy at BMC.

"Not all cloud providers are created equal," he said, referring to fundamental differences in their offerings, such as the way Rackspace will supply a bare virtual machine but Amazon will not. Furthermore, providers have their own APIs, and BMC's management software can only abstract them to the extent the services are similar. This makes workload portability challenging.

The location of data is another matter that needs to be addressed. Typically, processing needs to occur close to where the data is stored, but there are technical and compliance issues.

Various technologies are coming to address the former, but "it's still a big issue," VanHook said.

On the governance and compliance side, a major issue is that it is not always possible to tell in advance where your data will be stored. Some customers - notably government users - will need to ensure that certain types of data are stored only within the local jurisdiction, and this could lead to "a massive Balkanisation of cloud computing at the country level."

There are also commercial issues - please read on.