Cloud computing will become more prevalent this year, according to VMware regional director, Chris Norton.
“Companies will realise the benefits of bursting into the cloud as they require additional resources instead of making huge upfront investments in excess capacity to cater for peak periods,” he says.
Norton is one of the speakers at ITWeb's second annual Virtualisation of the Enterprise Conference, which takes place at The Forum, Bryanston on 21 and 22 July.
He will speak on meeting the challenges of enterprise virtualisation, while Manisha Bhoola, data centre technology and operations manager at Accenture, will examine Accenture's data centre transformation programme for the virtualised enterprise.
Norton says cloud hosting providers will start to provide choice and flexibility, whether organisations use the cloud as a complete failover solution, for transactional peaks or daily computing requirements.
He also states that total cost of ownership reductions will be a key driver in the acceleration of server virtualisation deployments. This is due to CIOs being forced to cut capital spending and rein in management, administrative, power and cooling costs.
Bhoola believes there are opportunities for public sector groups to build “enterprise” clouds with virtualisation and next generation data centre principles, which can be extended to cover multiple agencies and further reduce the cost of delivering infrastructure-as-a-service.
According to Bhoola, one of the public sector's biggest benefits is speed to the market as infrastructure costs are reduced and new applications are rolled out quicker.
Meeting challenges
The single biggest challenge of enterprise virtualisation is reducing the cost of IT to the business and the complexity that traditional models of IT have brought with them, says Norton.
“The overwhelming complexity of today's infrastructure is what keeps IT occupied most of the time - fighting fires and running routine maintenance is a task fraught with complexity. As a consequence the business has no room to manoeuvre,” he adds.
The biggest drawback within the public sector is perceived risk, Bhoola says. “The perceived risk is that servers and data are co-mingling on hardware and that a server failure will cause a bigger outage.”
The only difference between applications within the private and public sector is security, Bhoola adds. “Different government agencies may have higher security policies, but these can be met with adequate planning and design.”
The ITWeb Virtualisation of the Enterprise Conference will take place at The Forum, Bryanston in Johannesburg on 21and 22 July. For more information on the conference, click here.
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