Computerworld Malaysia’s inaugural seminar on cloud computing, which was held in Kuala Lumpur on October 29, and supported by companies such as Huawei Symantec Technologies, Microsoft, Symantec MessageLabs, and Websense, focused the session on cloud computing in the local context.
In his welcome address, AvantiKumar, Computerworld Malaysia deputy editor & Fairfax Business Media country correspondent said that cloud computing is one of the IT world’s emerging hot trends because of its potential to bring considerable operation and cost benefits to companies.
“Major companies such as Amazon, Google and IBM are working hard to turn cloud computing into reality,” AvantiKumar said. “In fact, IT analyst firms such as Gartner had been predicting that by 2011, early technology adopters would forgo capital expenditure and instead purchase 40 per cent of their IT infrastructure as a service and that cloud computing would take off.”
However, AvantiKumar said, there are dark linings in cloud computing, as companies are faced with a number of challenges going forward. “This is what our panel of experts today hope to address,” he said.
Defining the cloud
Addressing the forum first was Martin Gilliland, vice president, Asia Pacific ICT Practice, of Frost and Sullivan, who pointed out that cloud computing, like virtualisation, is not a new technology but really an amalgamation of existing technologies that are linked together to provide the necessary functionality for today’s enterprises.
“Cloud means different things to different people,” said Gilliland. “But a basic definition that we can use is: ‘A collection of resources—computing power, memory, storage capacity, applications, and managed services—delivered as a service over the Internet or over a private network connection’,” he explained.
Gilliland noted that within the Cloud, there are a number of taxonomies and they can be divided into three: Infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and software as a service (SaaS).
Examples of IaaS players, he said, are Amazon EC2 and Mosso; for PaaS, Google App Engine and Microsoft’s Azure; and SaaS, Salesforce.com, Google calendar/mail, WebEx and Windows Live.
He also noted that cloud computing has diverse benefits for different people in enterprises.
“For CEOs or CFOs, the potential benefits would be reduced capital expenditure, controlled operating expenditure, improved business agility and the ability to re-focus on the core business,” he explained. “For CIOs, cloud computing would alleviate the need for specific skill sets in the company, [help their IT organisations] benefit from economies of scale and [enjoy] rapid deployment, [derive] improve[d] capacity planning and [helps them] future proof their companies’ needs.”
However, Gilliland says, companies considering cloud computing also need to balance the risks factors involved. “CEOs would need to weigh in the impact of brand and revenue, should services in the cloud become unavailable, he said.” “CIOs, on the other hand, would need to consider the loss of [some] control in the IT infrastructure, integrating with existing environment, portability and lock-in issues, and governance.”
In the final analysis, Gilliland noted that enterprises wanting to get into cloud computing must avoid getting caught up in the technology hype but rather consider first and foremost issues such as business requirements, security, performance, availability and scalability requirements of the service before the evaluation of applicable technologies.
“Consider what key business issues can be addressed internally leveraging the technology available in the cloud. Also, note that it may be difficult, or even impossible, to transition some legacy apps to the cloud, factoring in transition effort and associated cost,” he said.
Storage cloud services
Taking the stage next was Jiang Tianlu, director of global storage technical sales, Huawei Symantec Technologies, who noted that one of the early areas which cloud computing has potential to take off is cloud-based storage. Huawei Symantec Technologies, a joint venture between Huawei and Symantec, specialises in information security and storage.
Tianlu noted that this trend is driven by the explosion of data storage in the enterprise in recent years. “Cloud storage is not storage, but a service. Users today don’t care what the storage device is like, what kind of interface and media they are,” he said. “They don’t want to manage and maintain storage device[s], they don’t want to think about backup and disaster and they certainly don’t care where the data is stored.”
Tianlu noted that what corporate users want is to connect and use the data they own in a cost-effective manner, with the ability to scale and expand. He said that they also want to do so with sufficient management of the data under high levels of availability and as securely as possible. “Cloud storage promises these features,” he added.
According to Tianlu, one of the success stories implemented by Huawei Symantec is with the world’s largest mobile player, China Mobile with over 508 million subscribers. “With our Wushan Cloud Storage System, we were able to provide China Mobile with storage service, which is reliable, expandable, easy to manage, as well as able to perform to the levels they expected while saving energy,” he said.
Software plus services
Mark Jewett, senior director, Server & Tools Business Group, Microsoft Asia Pacific noted that some in the industry have begun to sound the death knell of software with the advent of services in the cloud. “For some, services mark the culmination of software. At Microsoft, we believe that it doesn’t have to be a case of ‘either-or’. For security or privacy reasons, and for business differentiating purposes that require exquisitely detailed customisation or even for the purposes of the peace of mind of knowing where applications and data reside, software will always have unique benefits over a services model,” he said.
“However, for the ability to deliver solutions readily planet wide, for the flexibility in being able to subscribe to and unsubscribe from services without having to deploy people and hardware within an organisation and for the ability to offload—or outsource—non-differentiating technologies, services provide many benefits.
The debate is not whether enterprises will run software or services but how they may combine the best of both,” he said.
Jewett said Microsoft’s newly announced Azure cloud computing platform is the answer that combines the best of software and services that can suit customers’ needs. “Our building blocks comprise of Windows Azure, SQL Azure and .Net Services. On the application layer, we have Windows Live and Microsoft Office Live for consumers and Microsoft Online Services for business. For reasons such as data compliance, customisation requirements, and flexibility, customers may want to deploy a hybrid approach between online and on-premise,” he said.
Jewett highlighted another key value Microsoft provides—the flexibility to choose the deployment model between on-premises and online by geography, workload or roles. For example, a customer can decide to deploy Exchange Server in its own data centre for users in their headquarters and have their branch office users subscribe to Exchange Online, he explained.
“To enable a seamless experience such as a single address book, we provide a tool to synchronise entries in our customer’s on-premises directory with our online directory. With this tool, any changes you make on your directory are synchronised with our directory such as changing, adding or deleting a user, and even changing user attributes,” he said.
Spam, the driver of cloud
The next speaker, Richard Bowman, MessageLabs regional manager, for South Asia, spoke of the rising threat of spam and how it will continue to drive SaaS security adoption.
Bowman noted that according to research by MessageLabs, a division of Symantec, the current worldwide spam rate hovers around 88 per cent. “Just take a look at the Asian countries in the spotlight,” said Bowman. “China is at 92.9 per cent, Hong Kong 93.4 per cent, India 89.8 per cent, Singapore 90.4 per cent and Malaysia 90.2 per cent. The trend is clear, the complexity of spam and its dynamic nature means that stopping it continues to get more difficult,” he said.
Compounding this complexity is the fact that web-based malware is also increasing exponentially, just like e-mail. “Thus, purchasing ‘tools’ to try and stay on top of these challenges is no longer the way to go as doing so gets more difficult and less cost-effective,” he said.
This is why Bowman believes that SaaS delivers better protection because it does so with a completely different approach.
“Think of it as a way of outsourcing the hardware, software and service management,” he explained. “SaaS is an integrated, easy-to-manage, scalable solution, offering greater assurance and flexibility to businesses in challenging times as well as predictable costs and lower total cost of ownership [TCO].”
Bowman said this is where MessageLabs can help companies take on the task of management of e-mail security, as it is the market leader in this area.
“We have over 21,000 clients and nine million end-users in 100 countries. Our data centres process about a billion emails and Web connections per day, and we offer contractually guaranteed service level agreements [SLAs] to our customers.”
Five key benefits
Andy Lake, general manager for Websense, SaaS & Messaging Security, Asia Pacific noted that there are essentially five key benefits of cloud computing. The five factors are: reliability; security/privacy; data leaks; control; and, cost “At Websense, we believe that the cloud is where most of the problem lies and being a global leader in integrated Web, data and e-mail security solutions, we believe we can secure the cloud for our clients,” Lake said.
In terms of security, data leaks and performance, Lake pointed out that Websense has guarantee outcomes of up to 99 per cent spam detection rate, 99 per cent service availability, and 100 per cent protection against known viruses.
This confidence is also backed by security best practice certification, ISO 27001, as well as other physical security implementation, he added.
As for cost benefits, Lake said, cloud computing just makes sense to enterprises, as there is no equipment to install, maintain, upgrade and companies predict costs and guarantee outcomes.
“In some of independent studies undertaken recently by Osterman Research, the TCO of some enterprise hosted e-mail on the cloud is 40 per cent cheaper than if they were to run it themselves,” he said. “And as far as control is concerned, Websense provides complete policy control, flexible reporting, and end-user quarantine for their customers via web-based access.”
Benefits and challenges
Presenting the final session was Ng Kwang Ming, senior manager, Grid Computing Lab of Malaysian research agency MIMOS.
Referencing a MIMOS-commissioned survey conducted among 128 participants from various industries by IDC, Ng said that the top benefits perceived by respondents of the benefits of cloud computing were: enterprises would only pay for what they use, found easy and fast to deploy, and enterprises could always receive latest functionalities.
“There is no doubt that the age of the cloud has arrived,” Ng said. “But there are challenges for enterprises to adopt cloud computing going forward.”
Ng noted that some of these challenges include security concerns regarding Internet access and performance—those to do with matters such as keeping systems and information protected, and ensuring their availability—that cloud providers are unable to perform as advertised.
Still, Ng said, the benefits of shifting non-core functionalities to the cloud are appealing. “It will require a paradigm shift and at MIMOS, we have started moving non-core business functionalities such as accounting, HR management, e-mail, CRM into the cloud by engaging service providers to take care of these functions. This will enable MIMOS to do what it does best,” he said.
Concluding remarks
The panel concluded that despite several challenges surrounding cloud computing, the adoption of cloud computing is inevitable and it’s a question of when it will happen rather than whether it will happen or not.
