Date: Tue 19th October, 2010
Venue: 1 New York Street, Manchester, M2 3HQ
Enquire about this event
Cloud computing will become an unstoppable force as users begin to realise the benefits of hosted services. That was the message at Insider’s breakfast held at 1 New York Street in Manchester.
Jeremy Gidlow, managing director of internet performance company Intechnica told the audience that using a shared pool of computing resources would reduce the outgoings associated with physical servers.
“The main reason is cost – essentially it’s very cheap computing,” he said. “These services are available on demand with the ability to scale your systems up or down when required.”
Seventy five people gathered at the event to find out more about this much touted area of IT development. Many questioned the security of having your data hosted by a third party, but a four-strong panel argued that reduced costs make it an attractive proposition.
Martin Law from information security business First Defence said: “There will always be an element of doubt. But it comes down to your risk appetite – do the benefits outweigh the risks?”
Gidlow added: “You are responsible for it but all the main providers have tick boxes in their systems to ring fence your data. Loss of data is more likely to be down to bad management rather than somebody attacking the cloud platform.”
Asked whether existing IT infrastructure would become redundant, James Simpson from managed services provider Attenda said that a hybrid option for companies was more likely. “We see organisations that have made physical investments in software. They use the cloud for some of their systems but also keep some on their physical infrastructure.”
Cloud computing, where network access and services can be gained from a shared pool of computing resources, is expected to be one of the fastest-growing sectors of the technology industry this year.
Simple examples include personal applications such as Hotmail and Gmail – used by individuals but hosted on the internet. Commercial applications include Salesforce.com and Netsuite, while providers include Amazon EC2 and Windows Azure.
