Most enterprises plan cloud move but data location concerns the bottleneck, says Dell
Most large enterprises are still only considering the cloud and less than a third are currently using cloud services, according to Dell.
Most large enterprises are still only considering the cloud and less than a third are currently using cloud services, according to Dell.
Bryan Jones, Dell's executive director for public large enterprise for Dell in Europe, said around 30% of its large enterprise customers are using cloud services and infrastructure. But most of Dell's clients planning to move off-premise in the near future, he added.
Legacy IT is no longer relevant for solving business problems, says Bryan Jones. Concerns remain around cloud services and the high-profile Amazon cloud outage left customers questioning if cloud services are resilient, he said.
Cloud concerns
Jones says it is difficult for large businesses to adopt a public cloud model, which allows data to be located anywhere. This means the hybrid cloud model will be important, to allow companies to keep sensitive data inside the company firewall.
Dell hopes to address data location concerns with a UK datacentre, which will be turned on soon. This forms part of Dell's $1bn (£613m) investment into cloud services and infrastructure.
However, Jones said meeting business requirements through service level agreements (SLAs) is still a valid concern.
"There are a lack of standards, for example, in comparing what Dell is offering compared to Microsoft. That's something we're looking at to bring industry-standard platforms into the cloud discussion," Jones said.
Business driving cloud decisions
In the last nine months, Jones said he has witnessed exponential growth in business owners procuring cloud services, rather than organisations' cloud policies being purely IT-driven.
He said business people are constantly looking for functionality and IT departments need to keep up with the pace of change.
"There is absolute safety in having an IT point of view involved with the decision making. But business people are becoming more tech-savvy. It's not just an IT decision anymore," Jones said.
Jones believes the IT executive of the future will be able to look across technology and services as a portfolio manager.
