How the cloud is changing modern business

The adoption of cloud based services and virtualization is significantly changing the way that companies relate to the information they generate and receive. Increasingly, businesses are turning to platforms such as VMware and are focusing on creating personal cloud systems whereby applications and data exist off site and are accessed remotely via a secure connection.

This was the message delivered by Chad Sakac, Vice President of VMware Technical Alliance at EMC during the EMC Forum held today at Vodacom world in Midrand, South Africa.

According to Sakac, business infrastructure today is “bound by a lot of complexity and rigidity, rooted in the fact that the vast majority of data infrastructures and still physical”.

These infrastructures are unable to cope with the sheer weight of information that is being transmitted on a day to day basis. The current global data is load is sitting at 1.2 Zetabytes – to put this into perspective, Sakac explained that one could build a wall around South America constructed solely out of 32GB Apple iPads holding this information.

With global data levels expected to increase to 35 Zetabytes within a decade, businesses are facing some hard choices with regards to how they access and store their information. With the added challenges of a lack of growth in IT staffing over recent years and the ever present threat of security breaches, businesses are looking towards new technologies to compensate for the shift in IT that they are experiencing.

According to Sakac, cloud based technology is the answer. “Cloud based technology utilises innovations such as flash memory and virtualization and so has the capacity to allow fast paced adaptation to the changes we are seeing in the IT world today. We are seeing an emergence of dynamic and affordable public cloud options which are allowing users to access their applications and information without concerning themselves over the logistical challenges of storing it and making it freely available”.

Most enterprises today are in the process of creating their own private cloud models which are secure to the business but offer users access to public cloud like facilities, said Sakac. “The emerging model we are seeing is hybrid clouds, which are essentially a mixture of public and private cloud systems.”

Sakac believes that technology such and virtualization and flash memory will “change the way we relate to information in the same way that multi core processors did a few years ago.”