Cloud Computing – To go public or keep it private?

In the context of society’s increasingly urgent need for faster, better, more reliable IT needs, Singapore’s leading IT professionals sat down at the China Club to discuss the issues that Cloud Computing has thrown up. The roundtable event by the Singapore Business Review and EMC engaged its participants in an intriguing discussion on the concerns with Cloud Computing today and how companies really view this growing practice. Elizabeth Low brings you the highlights of the discussion.

Kenneth Thean: “I think Cloud is going to be the next big thing. Medical imaging technology is exploding in terms of the amount of information storage needed. I think the real issue is still that this (cloud computing) is very premature and people are grappling with issues now that we’re not dealing with brick and mortar companies anymore. No one really knows what happens if the service providers go belly up.”

Santosh Nair: “Trust is an issue with the cloud. It will take time for us to ‘trust’ the cloud and use it effectively, but hopefully a much shorter time than it took people to initially start trusting the ATMs to transact with the banks. People have started exploring the cloud in certain aspects, especially when it’s not dealing with personal data, user privacy is not at stake, it’s a private or on-premise cloud and/or there are no regulatory or legal compliance issues to grapple with. But it gets trickier when these topics become relevant and personal data is stored on the cloud. That’s when ‘trust’ in the cloud and the service provider is debated upon. I suppose that will change, but how soon, only the industry can say. In the end, it’s the user acceptance and adoption that will determine success of the cloud.”

Par Botes: “Public clouds are similar to having someone else doing IT for you.
Then you have the phase of the private cloud, which is more of architecture, or a philosophy on how you build IT technologies and not a business model.

In the industry we are currently building in our labs the last phase, what we call hybrid cloud; where you use a little bit of your own private cloud, augmented with public cloud. This allows you to migrate in-between the clouds, based on the work load and usage. So what we are trying to build are systems that allow us to provide end-users with easy to access spare capacity from your private cloud and the minute you need rapid extra capacity, you can immediately get it from a public cloud provider in a seamless fashion into your private cloud”.

Frank McGrath: “I think it’s very interesting, the concept of outsourcing, on demand computing. It’s seems that the industry is searching daily for the right phrase to make it acceptable.

This private, public cloud computing is partly driven by the standardization of infrastructure. You see all these companies coming together, like HP buying up other companies, all the architectures beginning to become a standardized value. The new driver has become standardization and that’s what’s increasingly becoming acceptable.”

Goo Li Ling: “For me, I’m in the finance department, so safe-keeping financial information is important to me, and all these are confidential.
My issue is that I don’t know how secure the cloud is. So talking about internal and external cloud, external is a big no-no for us. It is important for us to protect such data especially since we are listed in Australia.“

Aw Yong Sai Khoon: "The concern is, if you put everything on the public cloud, and if the (external) company closes, what can we do? Everything will be stored in there.
Yes, you can still sort out bigger portions, which is yours, but largely you won’t be able to take out what you put in."

Kevin Yap: "We have a presence in 10 countries in APAC and 4 Data Centres with an estimated 100+ servers spreading across them in a traditional architecture setup. We have plans to refresh these servers and consolidate them into one virtualized environment in a centralized Data Centre. The challenge that we face in this is network latency. For example, a user in Australia accessing an application from a datacentre in Sydney over a 100Mb/1Gb LAN environment versus accessing the same application at a centralized datacentre (let’s say in Singapore) over a 10Mb WAN link, will experience slower access.

In our situation, getting into a Cloud Computing (Private Cloud) will be a huge challenge as getting buy ins from the business stake holders will be tough because they will be worse off in a centralized virtualized environment as compared to having the data centre at a localized place next to their desk."

Torres Oey: "We have about 20 servers in the company. They overflow when we start the sales in our company. In the past every one month we’d have to start adding more ram, adding new servers and I think, this all has to stop because it all comes down to the business needs. I think cloud is not going to be the answer for every company. For us why we moved to cloud is really very simple: we will never have enough bandwidth and servers for our customers to come in from the Asia Pacific.
My system administrator is going to be running into trouble when the servers come to a halt.

For Rackspace Cloud Site, it is really very simple, they charge the minimum, you can start at US $100 a month and you get 50 gig of storage data, 500 gig monthly bandwidth and 10,000 compute cycle which is equivalent to 1 million page views if I’m not mistaken, so we went ahead with it."