By Tom S. Noda
Computerworld Philippines
March 4, 2010

Cloud computing is poised to change the landscape of IT solutions, and possibly the business models that underpin successful software and hardware companies. And in the Philippines, many organizations are now adopting the technology, according to a study by antivirus company Symantec.

The findings of Symantec’s 2010 State of the Data Center Study showed that many organizations in the Philippines are adopting cloud computing, with 50% of respondents indicating that they are in early discussions, planning and trial stages for private cloud computing, while 55% are doing so for public cloud computing.

Raymond Goh, Symantec’s regional technical director for systems engineering and customer advisory services, revealed the early adopters are usually enterprises with the need for the capacity to store and transfer large amounts of information, or for web-based access to data and applications. He added that alternatively, those that would benefit from a pay-per-use storage model may find cloud-based services an effective solution.

Yet Goh said although cloud computing is gaining significant traction as a new IT delivery model with potential business and financial benefits, it is still relatively new, and organizations are grappling with what this emerging delivery model is, what some of the potential barriers are, and how best to take advantage of it.

“Many organizations are still trying to decide the best way to leverage public and private clouds. Therefore, having an understanding on how to realize the benefits of cloud computing while mitigating potential risks are important” Goh said, adding the transition to the cloud will not be a clean break for a vast majority of organizations, but rather a gradual movement of applications, services, and supporting infrastructure into the cloud.

“Symantec enables customers at all stages of this transition. We are leveraging on our experience in managing the world’s largest SaaS storage environment in the world with more than 40 petabytes of online storage for more than nine million active users,” he claimed.

Goh reported Symantec is helping companies capitalize on the advantages of cloud computing with five distinct ways, which include: providing hosted services to businesses and consumers; enabling enterprises to build their own private cloud infrastructures with Symantec software and services; offering cloud-ready Symantec software through third-party cloud-infrastructure providers; enhancing Symantec software to interoperate with cloud-based services; and offering consulting services for cloud strategy development.

The executive also said Symantec provides solutions for security, compliance, availability, storage management, data protection, and endpoint virtualization for the highly virtualized and scalable environments required for cloud computing.

He cited that the latest cloud storage solution called Symantec FileStore, has set the new industry benchmark in performance scalability for cloud storage solutions. It delivers record results in Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC) System File Server (sfs) test, which demonstrated 47% greater throughput and 14% faster overall response time than the NetApp FAS6080 results posted in August 2009. The latest results also demonstrate the high performance capabilities of Symantec’s new cloud storage solution enabling enterprises to meet the demanding application challenges of cloud environments.

“By taking an information-centric approach to securing and managing information, Symantec can help organizations protect information assets as they adopt cloud computing to optimize costs and IT service delivery,” Goh said.

Goh quoted a reported by IDC, wherein it expects that in the next five years the spending on IT cloud services will grow almost threefold, reaching US $42 billion by 2012, and accounting for 9% of revenues in five key market segments. Software as a Service (SaaS) is described as the most mature offering in this area. New cloud services include a growing array of applications, platforms and infrastructure.

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