Cloud services

As-a-service at your service

Longform
Image: Stockfresh

15 May 2014

Oracle’s O’Riordan commented that he has seen large amount of attention beginning to focus on financial enterprise cloud services this year enterprise resource planning (ERP) in the cloud, was, he said, starting to make “a great deal of sense to a lot of businesses out there”.

“Ireland has a huge advantage when it comes to public cloud platforms due to the fact that a number of the tech world’s big players have located their data centres in Dublin … without the common concern that the data would be located outside of the national boundary – something many other countries would love to have and don’t,” said Nick Hyner, Dell

While he added that Oracle and others will look towards analytics-focused cloud services as a big source of interest over the next twelve months too. “What you’re going to see there is that customers will have an extremely large amount of choice,” said O’Riordan.

HP’s Halpin found himself echoing several industry voices by saying he envisaged “customers moving further into the enterprise cloud services space utilising the hybrid cloud delivery model” over the coming year.

Big data inevitable
When asked peer a little into the future, Commtech GM, Harvey said the possibilities surrounding analytics are enormous. “As security fears ease, and the accumulation of big data presents an inevitable and inescapable asset,” he said.

“Business intelligence, big data analytics hold enormous promise, but in the near term there are simply too many big data solutions searching for problems. In the long term, the potential for big data goes way beyond optimising e-commerce to embrace all kinds of verticals, from manufacturing to transportation to the electrical grid to the home. The list goes on.”

“Organisations will need to implement a hybrid delivery strategy that leverages the right mix of cloud and traditional IT to optimise application and service creation and delivery if they are to embark upon a successful cloud policy,” John Halpin, HP

Datapac’s Kinsella looked towards disaster recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS) becoming far more prevalent over the coming year. It will, he said, be particularly popular among enterprises in Ireland who have “invested in on-premises solutions for their ICT services”. Kinsella added, “Mature solutions are emerging which expedite the replication of ICT services in a simplified manner to the cloud”.

The CTO continued, “Research consistently shows that system failures causing down time and/or loss of data are the biggest headaches for IT departments. Having DRaaS in place means an organisation can meet their defined recovery point objectives (RPOs) and recovery time objectives RTOs. This approach offers peace of mind to an enterprise that’s looking for a fast, simple and highly reliable approach to disaster recovery.”

Right platform
Dell director of cloud service, Hyner said the biggest change he sees developing is enterprises starting to understand that they should “utilise the right platform for the right workload”, rather than going through the painful process of trying to find a single solution that matches all of their requirements.

“Desktop is no longer seen as the core device for business activity. Customers want a multi-device delivery platform for their applications, with the traditional desktop OS being only one of many delivery platforms for these applications,” Richard O’Brien, Triangle

“This may be some combination of public and private cloud. It may be retaining some workloads in-house, and moving others to a cloud platform,” said Hyner. “This openness to consider opportunities on a workload level, rather than for their full infrastructure, opens up a lot more possibilities for using cloud platforms.

“With the price war that has now kicked off between the large public cloud providers also adding to this debate, public clouds are now more appealing than ever, but they still need to be used in the correct context,” said Hyner. “We see services that help enterprises understand which platform suits each workload being fundamental in the future.”

Read More:


Back to Top ↑

TechCentral.ie