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Telstra predicts: 'Community of interest' clouds form for IT sharing

By Carol Ko 20-Feb-2012

Nathan Bell, Director, Products and Marketing, Telstra International
Nathan Bell, Director, Products and Marketing, Telstra International

What were your three most important lessons learnt about cloud computing in 2011? 

Bell: Telstra recently completed its “State of the CXO 2011 Survey” in association with CIO Magazine which surveyed 364 IT professionals across Asia. 

"With the political uncertainty and volatile global economy, many organizations are finding it difficult to forecast business activity and infrastructure requirements three to five years ahead."

 

-- Telstra' International's Nathan Bell speaks about the benefits of cloud services adoption

One finding was that innovation is hampered in many organizations. Other findings also point to a potential damper effect for cloud computing to take off in Asia, including:
  • Over 60% of CXOs surveyed said they were involved too late in the decision making process while 50% said that they were too busy maintaining existing systems and infrastructure to focus on innovation. 

  • Apart from India and Singapore, outsourcing is not a consideration for most Asian CXOs.
In order to stay dynamic, businesses need to focus on their core competencies, which ultimately mean they should establish a partner ecosystem which allows them to leverage expertise from a selection of partners to provide application support, as well as infrastructure and network support. 

Last but not least, although cloud services are not revolutionary in nature, they require businesses to re-shape their infrastructure to be one that’s network-centric in order to reap the benefits of cloud services. CIOs need to overcome internal barriers, find that crucial balance between managing short term priorities whilst developing a long term transition towards virtualization of IT, and ultimately consider where selective partner enabled services can offer greater productivity, efficiency and ensure sustainable operations. 

Where will cloud computing head towards in 2012?

Bell: Next year we will see enterprises becoming more comfortable with the concept of cloud computing -- both for private cloud and hybrid environments that offer businesses the ability to ‘burst’ into the cloud and draw on additional compute resources as needed. This comfort factor will largely be driven by businesses recognizing that moving towards cloud computing does not mean handing over the keys to the proverbial closet, but creating test environments in which they can the benefits of cloud computing for themselves.

We’ll also expect to see the creation and consolidation of ‘community of interest’ clouds -- bands of organizations that club together around a particular industry vertical or solution area on a shared but secure and cost-effective infrastructure. These ‘community of interest’ clouds will represent a first step to business process-based architectures with the end goal being greater transparency for businesses on the combined network and IT architecture performance required to support their core business.






Tags:
2011 review, 2012 predictions, community interest cloud, data center, investment, Komatsu, network, survey, Telstra, Visy Industries




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