Realizing the Cloud Dream: What it takes to take the first step


It has been an interesting week where I actively engaged in discussions with CTOs of cloud computing vendors and
early adopter of cloud computing in Asia Pacific. Couple of interesting threads of discussion emerged as follows.

1. One CTO highlights the ability for organization to now connect to the cloud while hosting identity and security-related credentials and data in-house. Will that help to alleviate your concerns now that your team
can centrally host and control the security data in-house while sourcing infrastructure requirements externally ?

2. Some early cloud computing adopters state that it is imperative to have good control and governance over network delivery capabilities while embarking on the path to cloud computing. As such, some have taken steps to revamp internal network equipments and to beef up connectivity leveraging MPLS technology to connect with the cloud service providers. Will these requirements be also yours when you source your public cloud infrastructure from your service providers ?

As my conversations with the end user communities increase over the next few months, I envisioned many teams taking steps internally to booster their existing virtualization environment with better management tools and the right connectivity infrastructure needed to deliver the cloud computing enabled business services across to their stakeholders. Love to hear your comments.

Wishing all a happy and prosperous Chinese New Year 2010. Gong Xi Fa Cai.
Dr Patrick

Hi Henk,

Like to have a chat on your enterprise concerns on SaaS. Have you got a conversation with the team on their concerns and how technology like what I outlined can help? There are various other alternatives in securing network and data. However, trusted partners execution is key.

I have conversed with several other CIOs who have implemented customer portals on the SaaS platform. Think agility, speed, scale and market penetration is important. As more steps into the areas, we suspect that competition will drive the movement.

Regards,
Dr Patrick

In one of our projects where we have looked at a Customer Service Management solution, we have included on premise options as well as a SAAS-based solution. Besides the concerns on privacy, securit and performance, the financial business case and TOC of the SAAS solution was on our case worse than most of the on premise solution, primarily because of the high recurring annual subscription fee of the SAAS solution.

For e-mail we're currently also evaluating a SAAS based option instead of renewing our current on-premise solution. Since the fee for such a service is much lower than the solution mentioned above, there will be less issues with the cost/TCO and since e-mail is also less 'critical' than a core application, I believe in this case the SAAS solution will have a higher probability to reach the finish-line.