Australia leads the world in cloud adoption

While many believe the term ‘cloud’ is overused, a forum panel of Australian industry people this week said that around 35% of Australian organisations are considering implementing cloud in the next two years.

Nineteen percent of Australian organisations are building cloud now, according to Rodney Gedda, Senior Analyst, Telsyte, who led the panel.

Gedda said, “A lot of people are confused with the internet and the cloud. Private cloud is a dynamic way of provision and de-provisioning in response to business needs as companies go from virtualisation to private cloud.

“As private cloud is not multitenanted, some people believe it is not ‘cloud’. However, private cloud is challenged by public cloud. Organisations build up their private cloud but need public cloud services as well, so end up with hybrid cloud.

“Server virtualisation has ‘won the war’ with more than 50% of Australian organisations using it in some way, so the next step is private clouds,” Gedda said.

The panel included Richard Jenman, ANZ Managing Director, Eaton; Adrian Briscoe, General Manager - APAC, Kroll Ontrack; Pieter DeGunst, Sales and Marketing Director, Tecala; and Scott Robertson, Vice President Asia Pacific, Channels and Alliances, WatchGuard Technologies.

WatchGuard’s Robertson said, “Australia is one of the fastest adopters of virtualisation and cloud because it enables the flexibility to provision services rapidly.”

He disagreed with Gedda’s figure of 19% for organisations which are building cloud now, and said the figure was somewhere between 8 and 9%.

“So what is the other 90% doing?” Robertson asked. “The main hurdle is security and compliance […] with 90% of security hardware appliances yet to move to a virtual software-based model. Companies adopting virtualisation should consider partitioning the server with virtual firewalls.”

Tecala’s DeGunst said, “Moving to private cloud gives you more efficiencies than virtualisation. A lot of organisations will always have a private cloud as moving to public cloud is not necessarily more cost-effective.

“It’s really horses for courses. Benchmarks have found that private is cheaper than public cloud in some cases. It really boils down to what is best for the organisation,” DeGunst said.

By Merri Mack