Cisco’s Considerations for Cloud Computing

Until recently, there was a distinct lack of consensus among technology providers as to what cloud computing actually means – today it is widely agreed upon that cloud services deliver shared resources, software and information as a utility over a network.

Significantly, it is also generally accepted that cloud-based services are signalling the next stage of evolution for the online environment.

This was the trend outlined by Cisco’s Val Moodley at a recent Cloud Computing event held in Johannesburg.

“When closely observed, the foundation upon which cloud computing is built is a fully operational and stable network” said Moodley.

This means that organisations have to be keenly aware of the fundamental requirements behind an effective cloud solution before transferring important business processes to these services.

In order to fully deploy cloud-based services and realise the benefits behind offsite application hosting and data transfer, organisations must first understand that the movement towards cloud computing is a journey which should begin with a consolidation and virtualisation process.

“The key in this instance is to move away from the understanding of business processes and applications as individualistic, but rather as a series of interconnected services that are designed to interconnect with each other. “

“This is the underlying concept behind virtualisation, and has arguably paved the path towards the growing prevalence of cloud computing today. In short, we at Cisco strongly believe that virtualisation should be embraced by every organisation before making the giant leap towards full cloud computing deployment” Moodley continued.

Virtualisation allows organisations to bring similar platforms into a common pool through which they are given the ability to interact. These pooled resources can be broken down into three bundles: namely network infrastructure, computing power and storage.

It is so important that these resources are able to effectively work together in a virtualised environment according to the autonomic needs of the organisation before rolling out cloud-based systems which enhance, or entirely replace the system architecture.

The elastic supply of technological resources to the organisation, on demand, through a virtualised environment is the foundation upon which cloud services must be delivered. These ‘building blocks’ are important to the widespread adoption of the cloud on both an enterprise and community level.

“On a delivery level, we predict a massive shift towards video as broadband connections become more advanced and widely available. It is estimated that 90% of all online traffic will be video-delivered content by 2014 – this will certainly have an effect on how businesses and consumers relate to information.” Moodley concluded.