People and processes – barriers to cloud: VMware

People and processes are barriers to cloud adoption, not technology and security, according to VMware.

“Technologically, the issues [around cloud adoption] aren’t significant. The biggest issues are people and process issues,” said Tod Nielsen, president at VMware, who was in London for VMware Forum 2011.

“People ask about security and privacy. But when you get to the heart of the issue, those issues are about people not trusting each other. People want to control what they own.”

The government initiative, the G-Cloud, is an example of this, Nielsen said: “Some of their barriers are not the vision or technology, but getting each department of the UK to give up control so there can be a pool of cloud resources.”

Although businesses could be forgiven for being concerned about security when a recent survey found that the majority of cloud computing providers allocate only up to 10% of IT resources to security. Cloud providers were found to be more focused on delivering benefits such as reduced costs and speed of deployment, the study from the Ponemon Institute for CA Technologies said.

Nielson believes that while organisations will eventually become 100% virtualised, he does not think that they will ever put their entire businesses in a public cloud.

“Today, the average enterprise can envision 30% of their workload being in the public cloud, but the majority will be in their private cloud. They will move simple things like SaaS applications and more generic workloads in there, such as development, testing and simple applications, but we don’t see a day where 100 percent of workloads will be in the cloud.

“Every CIO we talk to says their strategy is a hybrid cloud,” he said.

The technology services of the future will also revolve more around the end user, with the iPad being an example of the post-PC era, according to Nielsen.

The end-user experience and requirements have driven VMware’s recent strategic acquisitions, of enterprise microblogging platform Socialcast, online presentation software provider SlideRocket and open source email and collaboration platform Zimbra.

“We are not completely sure what the new desktop is, but it will have a social aspect, collaboration and presentations. IT will have to focus on how to deliver applications, data and so on, to their constituents, to whatever device they want,” Nielsen added.