CA Technologies recently held its “Realise the Cloud 2011” forum in Sydney
The ways companies can implement new ways to deliver faster, better and higher-quality business solutions to market while improving IT cost structures formed the theme of CA Technologies' recent Realise the Cloud 2011 forum in Sydney.
Forrester Research principal analyst vice-president, John Brand, said while the company had seen Cloud adoption continue to accelerate across Asia-Pacific, it had found that data privacy and residency-related concerns had replaced security as the top Cloud barrier in the region.
As the Cloud market in 2011 was mainly focused around Software as a Service (SaaS) and found to be worth around $US21 billion, Brand expects it to grow to more than $US78 billion in 2015.
During his presentation, Brand outlined the three stages of good Cloud economics, which consisted of scaling up with elastic and transient applications, scaling down through application optimisation and performance monitoring, before finally settling into a profit centre that made use of new revenue streams and hybrid architecture.
In turn, the three stages of virtualisation were found to consist of capacity, reliability and performance management; virtualisation management and infrastructure automation; and application virtualisation and dynamic service control.
Brand highlighted that most organisations remain at the “strategic consolidation” stage when implementing the cloud, which tends to cover the manageable deployment of business critical workloads.
“The ‘enterprise’ Cloud is becoming more 'personal,' and in order to realise the value of the cloud, companies need to manage it throughout the lifecycle,” he said.
CA Technologies national customer solutions unit senior director, Carl Terrantroy, spoke about the consumerisation of the IT era, as well as how pervasive connectivity and the cloud have "blurred people’s personal and professional lives."
Terrantroy highlighted how the CIOs have found themselves in a changing landscape that consists of the “new normal” and consumerisation of IT, and how this can lead to a transformational opportunity.
Some of the opportunities he highlighted included strategic collaboration, innovation, a different customer experience and a heightened level of customer trust.
For CA Technologies virtualisation and Cloud director, Peter Sharples, it is important that a company builds, automates and optimises service delivery across Cloud infrastructure.
If an organisation is able to do that, he expects improved IT responsiveness and lower costs, which will lead to highly flexible on-demand services.
“Manual management is not enough for heterogenous dynamic service delivery via the cloud,” Sharples explained.
He said virtualisation and automation was critical to deliver services “accurately, efficiently and quickly.”
According to Sharples, if organisations want to adopt an infrastructure focus, they are able to evolve to the private cloud by leveraging their investments, though an application focus will result in a “radical turn-key application-centric cloud.”
“As we move to a ‘conveyed stack’ infrastructure, it will provide businesses with a new way of delivering IT services,” he said.
While securely controlling identities and access in the Cloud is important, CA Technologies security solution practice lead, Trevor Iverach, also highlighted the importance of having a “security mindset” that is open to the challenges of the future.
He endorses a unified approach to secure business enablement, which means moving from a “no” to “know” frame of mind, and "knowing" the user and their access to data.
Iverach also outlined the vendor’s Cloud security vision, which aims to broadly cover identity management and provisioning, federated single sign-on, and flexible authentication.
CA Technologies recently celebrated its 35th year anniversary.
