Cloud computing and virtualisation are reshaping the IT landscape with a rapidity that will soon see companies confidently switching select enterprise workloads between both public and private clouds.
“Its only a matter of the market maturing enough before it will be standard practice for companies to shift workloads according to their changing requirements,” predicts Hein van der Merwe, Sun Microsystems’ Chief Technologist for the Eastern Mediterranean , Middle East & Africa region. “Certain functions could be shifted seamlessly into a public cloud to free up the private cloud computing power – essentially virtualised internal infrastructure – during certain operations or busy periods.”
Van der Merwe says that current concerns around privacy and security will long have been allayed by the time that the market reaches this level of maturity.
“Eventually it moves into a trust relationship. You can introduce legislation and standards on the security side, but in the end it falls back on a trust relationship between you and your cloud provider.
“In the same way your relationship with your financial institution is built on trust more than it is on documented, legislative guarantees.”
He says that Sun is already seeing a shift in the mindset regarding cloud computing on the back of the success of Software as a Service (SaaS) providers.
“We have noticed a market shift, due to the hype around cloud computing, in the growing acceptance of things like SaaS. And that is the starting point; as soon as companies gain confidence in shifting services such as their email into the cloud, they will be as comfortable doing the same with other services and operations.”
The speed with which these true cloud computing services are coming to market, he says, is because they have been available in different guises, and that they can now be deployed as public cloud computing offerings.
He points to Sun’s Network.com cloud computing service, which it is transforming into a public cloud service to cater to the growing number of companies adopting this model.
“The Network.com solution did the same thing, although that infrastructure had not been virtualised. So, currently in the process in the process of virtualising this infrastructure, we will be able to offer the capabilities, but at a significantly increased level of flexibility due to the virtualsation benefits.”
“One of the major changes cloud computing has brought is the growing acceptance to having someone else looking after your environment or select portions or functions thereoff. The initial start-up cost to the customer is potentially also much lower than creating these operations in-house, particularly in the small and medium business sectors. This potential saving combined with the flexibility and fast deployment nature of cloud services are the biggest factors influencing adoption.”
Van der Merwe says large enterprises that have a significant internal infrastructure, even if virtualised, would also see benefits as the economies of scale are so vast, and believes there is justification for them in using the public cloud as and when needed.
The key component to the success of such flexibility between public and private clouds is that all solutions have to standardise their interfaces for the environments.
“We are looking to avoid vendor lock-in so you can move between public and private clouds and from one vendor to another,” he explains.
Open source therefore features prominently in this arena, least of all because many solutions are based on open-source software because of the cost benefits.
“And as the owner of the biggest set of open source technologies that fit into that arena, Sun has a much bigger technology set to work from and the ability to get the efficiencies from than anyone,” he states.
Van der Merwe says, economic crisis notwithstanding, companies are turning and will continue to turn to cloud computing as a cost-effective, but efficient service.
“The groundswell is building, and we are positioning ourselves to take full advantage of that set of technologies to help our customers realise the cost and efficiency benefits,” he says.
