The key obstacle impeding the move to the hybrid cloud is the lack of an understanding of what it can do for your business.
James Walker, Tata Communications VP of managed network services and president of the Cloud Ethernet Forum, said telcos need to work out a cloud strategy. “There is a limited understanding of the value of data, so companies don’t know what to spend looking after it -- on things like storage, security, analytics.”
Speaking at NetEvents cloud conference in Singapore last week, Juniper Networks’ Doug Wills said some industries are ahead of the learning curve – for example, Amazon and Google -- in the use of analytics the impact the cloud can have.
Grameenphone’s Tawhid Rijwanur Rahman pointed out that telcos are reluctant to move to the public cloud because they are not sure how to monetize cloud services. “It’s a big change for them. But sometimes you just have to jump in -- you start small and grow. But you need to avoid a big bang approach.”
Tata Communications VP Amit Sinha Roy said the cloud as a new IT delivery model is disrupting business models and industries. Growth in cloud data centers, for example, is three times that of traditional data centers.
Wills emphasized the need to focus on the future as storage, networking and computing all converge. “Businesses tend to make decisions that are conservative. We’re seeing similar controls when considering the public cloud because firms feel that have to have facilities on premise.”
But that is starting to change as companies see how public clouds drive scale and efficiencies. He said the US military has awarded a $500 million cloud project to AWS.