The take-up of private cloud technologies and services is expected to accelerate further this year.

A year ago, research companies like IDC and Gartner predicted that the maturing of the cloud will play a key role in shaping the information and communications technology (ICT) industry in the Asia Pacific.

In a recent forecast for 2011, IDC said it expects the take-up of private cloud technologies and services in medium and large enterprises will accelerate further this year due to lingering concerns about security, reliability and performance of public cloud services.

Private cloud initiatives will enable scalable approaches to application use, as well as enhanced mobility, without the risk of private data being exposed to the public,
said IDC.

However, integration between cloud services and internal systems is an issue that will have to be addressed before any cloud initiative can gain any traction within the enterprise. “Given that the Asian enterprise will adopt cloud services as targeted solutions for specific needs rather than in a ‘rip and replace’ manner, it is imperative that existing apps and cloud apps are integrated,” said IDC. “Without this integration, it will be difficult to achieve ROI targets and siloed apps will again frustrate
business users.”

In Gartner’s view, vendors will offer packaged private cloud implementations that deliver the vendor's public cloud service technologies (software and/or hardware) and methodologies (i.e., best practices to build and run the service) in a form that can be implemented inside the consumer's enterprise. Many will also offer management services to remotely manage the cloud service implementation.

The growing adoption of cloud computing is estimated to have created a US$1.1 billion cloud computing market in the Asia Pacific, according to Frost and Sullivan. In Singapore, in particular, cloud computing is set to be an important driver of growth as the country seeks to establish itself as one of the cloud hubs in Asia Pacific. “The Singapore cloud computing market is set to witness strong growth powered by CRM, Collaboration and HRM applications,” said Mr Nitin Bhat, Partner & Vice President of the Frost & Sullivan ICT Practice Asia Pacific.

Meanwhile, Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) will continue to drive demand for cloud computing services in this part of the world, especially for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), which is currently the dominant segment with 90 per cent share of the market and is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 39 per cent from 2010 to 2014.

Mr Bernard Golden, Virtualisation and Cloud Computing Advisor for CIO magazine in the United States, described SMEs as “a natural fit” for SaaS.

Some parallels may be drawn between this and Mr Golden’s other observation that cloud computing will take off even more quickly in emerging economies. He gives the analogy of mobile phones – many developing countries bypassed fixed line telephony and went straight into mobile as the main form of voice communications because of its convenience, flexibility and lower cost.

Like SMEs, many companies in emerging economies are not likely to have a significant installed base of infrastructure. “Consequently, IT organisations have no reason to avoid using public cloud computing; after all, the choice is between nothing and something, rather than an existing something and a new something.”

However, Mr Golden believes that SaaS is by no means only an SME phenomenon. “SaaS will become the default choice for organisations of all sizes that wish to squeeze costs on non-core applications.”