Irish businesses are embracing the opportunities afforded by infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) in increasingly large numbers according to cloud industry experts. While a number of enterprise cloud services have found commercial success in recent months, Nick Hyner, director for cloud services EMEA with Dell commented that “Like other countries in Europe we are beginning to see a clear trend toward IaaS cloud platforms being employed for use-cases other than just test and development”.
Tadhg Cashman, director of infrastructure consulting with Logicalis Ireland meanwhile said he had seen “a significant uptake in interest and usage” of IaaS of late. “Customers who would never previously have trusted cloud-based infrastructure service providers are beginning to trial some workloads in the cloud, and run proofs-of-concept for hybrid cloud deployments.
Head of technical strategy for Cisco Ireland, Tom Long said on the subject, “In terms of IaaS, Irish enterprise unsurprisingly have turned to the well-known hyperscale providers. When it comes to production applications, we have found that enterprise are willing to migrate certain business applications to the cloud.
Long added that, “Applications which are considered suitable to be delivered under the new cloud service model include, but aren’t limited to, email, payroll, CRM, unified communications and in certain circumstances the whole desktop experience is being delivered as a cloud service.”
“Talking about the cloud as something separate from the business is rather like separating finances from the business. Think of mainframe as the first platform, and the client/server as second platform. The third platform is that ecosystem comprising millions of applications access by billions of users. Enterprise cloud services cross the entire spectrum, XaaS — everything as a service,” Gerry Harvey, Commtech
Growing momentum
Long was among the many cloud experts who pinpointed a surge in interest for desktop-as-a-service, with the offering now more robust than previous iterations. David Kinsella, CTO with Datapac was another who commented on this topic.
“There is growing momentum in the Irish market for DaaS,” said Kinsella. “The service facilitates centralised management and upgrades of desktops and applications to maintain strict security and compliance levels.
“An added bonus provided by such an investment is that it introduces business continuity at the desktop layer, something that is usually only considered for the server environment,” he said.
Altered landscape
Gerry Harvey, general manager with Commtech commented that enterprise cloud services have at this point radically “altered the landscape of technology applied to business”. Continued Harvey, “It’s not about popular services, or about partially ‘out-tasking’ some processing to the cloud. It’s about mobility, big data and advanced analytics to transform business.
“In fact,” he continued, “talking about the cloud as something separate from the business is rather like separating finances from the business. Think of mainframe as the first platform, and the client/server as second platform. The third platform is that ecosystem comprising millions of applications access by billions of users. Enterprise cloud services cross the entire spectrum, XaaS — everything as a service.”
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