Cloud computing dividing opinion

There is not a complete consensus that the cloud computing concept will be the be-all and end-all of the IT sector. Steve Wallage, managing director, Broadgroup Consulting, comments: "There is the idea that it is the big bang and everything will go to the cloud. People are talking now about the notion of private clouds, where your application can run from anywhere. But clearly for many people, let alone companies, that isn't going to be acceptable."

Wallage adds that there could be an issue with the laws surrounding data being held in different countries. "Let's say you're a UK company and you had cloud data centres based in France or Germany, the accountants are saying well if there s a possibility the transaction was taken place in France, then you'll have to pay French tax."

However, some within the industry are of the opinion that cloud computing is destined for the Middle East, although when this will happen is far from certain. "The CIOs have not yet embarked on the virtualisation journey yet and as a consequence, the cloud comes after that, so I still see cloud as something that will take at least a couple of years to become an accepted delivery model," says Jyoti Lalchandani, vice president and regional managing director, IDC.

Demand for cloud computing increasing

Citrix, a company which works in cloud computing, reveals there is an appetite for the technology in the Middle East. "In this part of the world we have thousands of companies that are doing cloud computing but private cloud computing, where they deliver their application in a cloud computing environment so they have decided to centralise that application on a couple of servers and to deliver the application as a service to their employees. The same infrastructure is ready if people want to use the public cloud," Antoine Aguado, regional director, Middle East, Citrix tells AMEinfo.com.

One of the first concerns posed about cloud computing, and perhaps one of the most misplaced concerns as well, is the issue of security. Aguado believes moving towards the cloud actually improves security for a firm: "We think that first of all the more you centralise and the more you virtualise, the more secure your application is. Recently we have seen more and more chief security officers of major IT organisations recommend centralisation and virtualisation for their applications and desktops because it is secure by design."

Lack of bandwidth affecting cloud computing

The Middle East struggles with a lack of bandwidth, something which could hinder the progress of new technology. However, it is thought that moving to the cloud through virtualisation can ease the strain on the limited bandwidth which can be available in this region. "I think this is more of an opportunity than a constraint, if they had all the bandwidth they required, companies would be less driven to go towards virtualisation. The reason companies are using this in the Middle East is that it is a solution which requires very little bandwidth," states Aguado.

In the majority of systems there is an application installed on a desktop and a backup server in a data centre. This means there is a lot of traffic going between the PC and the server as information is constantly being sent between the two, taking up a lot of bandwidth. "The idea of our architecture is to execute 100% of an application in a data centre and just send an image and a graphical interface of an application to the desktop so it can be used with very little bandwidth," explains Aguado.

Pricing structures for IT services have been changing ever since the introduction of software-as-a-service. The common structure for IT companies investing in cloud technology is for them to initially pay for the infrastructure to be installed, and then effectively rent out different applications from the vendors.