Ten IT heads and industry experts discussed issues and potential hazards as well as creative solutions and possible strategies for cloud computing and mobility on the sidelines ofthe Asia Cloud conference in Singapore November 2012.
Specifically, the roundtable discussion zoomed in on the impact of the cloud and mobility on enterprise storage infrastructure. The topic is strategically important because cloud storage is expected to be 39% of total enterprise drive capacity this year, according to Seagate Market Research and IDC. Further,Gartnerforecasts that 36% of all consumer digital content will be stored in the cloud by 2016.
Below are excerpts of theSeagate-sponsored roundtable discussion, which was moderated by Victor Ng, South-East Asia bureau chief of Questex Asia. This is the first of a two-part coverage.
Issues and challenges
Waleed Hanafi: Our big challenges are around getting online -- the problem of communications when in a foreign country and being cut off because of price; and the big data problem, the need to look at transactional data in real time.
Teo Chin Seng: In the future, life will be complex as we become more urbanized. Our job is to make staying in the city easier. We are looking at the life-long record of people so we can [enhance] their life. As a result, storage becomes private and public, controlled and uncontrolled, accessible and not accessible.
K Kumar Pisharath: Recently, we moved an application to something we provide as software as a service (SaaS). It's been a painful journey but we're beginning to see the benefits. People are increasingly accepting SaaS although when they do the math, they find that in the long run, it costs more than [having the applications in the box]. But we're seeing progress [in SaaS adoption].
Laurence Lim: I manage gigabytes of data in migrating legacy systems to SAP systems. Having [these systems] on the cloud would be a challenge in terms of performance. So, if we talk about data migration running 2 to 3 hours, what would it be like running this on the cloud?