CEBU, Philippines - The significance of cloud computing to small and medium enterprises (SMEs) was recently tackled during the recent CloudCamp Cebu 2012 event held recently at Cebu City Marriott Hotel.
Globe Business, which made the holding of the event possible, describes cloud computing as a concept of sharing resources similar to electricity grid with the internet serving as its network.
Those who have taken advantage of cloud computing have used web browsers or mobile applications in accessing their data which are stored in remote locations, allowing them to do away with bigger services as well as making their computer systems run faster because they do not need huge storage facilities.
“Cloud gives us the ability to spread our resources among multiple infrastructure,” Jojo Colina of Arcus IT said.
Cloud computing could help business firms and other agencies store their data over the internet by cutting the cost of losing important documents if ever the system bogs down due to circumstances and disasters.
Colina cited the incident wherein one of the data services of Instagram failed. He said that when the US East 1 zone suffered a catastrophe due to network interruption brought by a severe storm, Instagram failed because it did not adhere to the very basic tenets in creating a resilient system.
The fact that the cloud exists gives the organization more access to tools of resiliency in traditional means. They would not have suffered the embarrassing fate of losing part of their service capability when their single data zone went away.
Meanwhile, Kevin Pratesa, ASEAN VMWARE director of Service Providers and Public Control, said that one of the advantages of cloud solutions is that it can give an extra level of security and extra level of disaster recovering mechanism so that if something happens to the primary level in times of failure.
Pratesa said that there is no cost of investment in cloud. There is no upfront acquisition of equipment, licenses or even hiring of people.
John Pabellon of Net suite, however warned that customers should also be aware that not all cloud service providers are created equal. One of the basic practices is to evaluate the service providers and make sure that they have a resilient infrastructure that they can cope with disaster and has a good track record in serving critical services and applications.
Pabellon added that Filipino businesses are open in having their data stored off premise where businessmen can access their data even outside the country.
Cyril Rocke of DataOne Asia said that another advantage of cloud computing is that the virtualization of cloud can be experienced for just one peso per hour or for only 730 pesos per month to avail the 1 gigabyte (GB) RAM cloud server.
“The essence of the cloud is that you get all those benefits in a very small sachet if you wish. Also, a 99.99 percent availability,” Rocke said. by Christine Emily Pantaleon, USJR LIACOM INTERN
In the issue of security and connectivity, Benjie Tan of Globe Business said that it is up to the individual on how he designs his security. You can avail the cloud in a private setting and secure the connection. You can build in layer defense. It is how you balance on how much you want to spend on the value of protecting it.
The Globe Business supported CloudCamp Cebu 2012 is one of the world’s biggest gatherings of early adapters, proponents, and developers of cloud solutions and related technologies. CloudCamp is a series of conferences held worldwide.
The Cebu leg of CloudClamp was hosted by ArcusIT Inc. and focused on the types of cloud computing. (FREEMAN)