The Race Is on for Cloud Computing in Australia
The race is on for local Australia-based producers to deliver quality cloud computing services before the global players decide to come in and set up shop. Managed hosting services and hosting providers are currently working towards including cloud computing services in their portfolios. But to become market leaders, deep operational capabilities including topnotch security are required. These features will easily aggregate the demand fast by landing government and corporate deals.
In Australia, cloud computing follows a chicken and egg scenario where the chicken stands for the demand for the service and the egg is the supply. It’s difficult to really determine which came first. For one, enterprise and government buyers are still reluctant to embrace offshore clouds due to compliance concerns. The problem is that Australia still has yet to provide mature cloud services locally.
The elasticity of the pay-as-you-go model of cloud computing also requires an ability to build infrastructure as the demand increases – a tough challenge for relatively small economies. Australia is also lacking a Google, Amazon or Salesforce equivalent that has the ready cash and mindset required to create pure ‘as-a-service’ products.
Local cloud services are currently evolving at the infrastructure layer from hosting companies and managed service providers. Telestra recently announced a five year deal for private cloud solutions with Visy while Melbourne IT is one of the first to provide genuine pay-as-you-go infrastructure solutions through the launch of the beta vCloud Express service that is based on the vCloud by VMware.
However, hosting providers are still faced with the challenges of legacy technologies, skills, processes and contractual commitments. They are still addressing numerous issues regarding change management as they go through the transformations. Then there are the global cloud providers that are almost ready to swoop in and take over the market. It’s going to be one tall order for local providers to deliver according to the quality standards of the country’s demand.
