The public cloud will play a huge role in the future of IT, offering new levels of IT efficiency and lower unit costs for standard IT services, write Fujitsu's Jonathan Bridges and Glenn Fitzgerald. But one overriding consideration will cause many organisations to shy away from putting much of their core data in it: trust, or rather the lack of it.

It will take a brave CIO to decide that key data is held in the public cloud. Not only because access will depend on the reliability of the cloud service but also because they will have no direct control over the security of that stored data.

That said, more than ever before, companies are focusing on their underlying costs, reducing capital expenditure where possible and seeking out and targeting areas of inefficiency. And those pressures are driving many to use third-party services. The issue they face is that while cloud might be a step too far, traditional data storage services are one-dimensional: they treat all data the same, charging a flat rate.

When organisations need to know the location and security profile of the data centres that deliver their IT services, and when they need a bit more from IT than a vanilla service, they will demand levels of service that fill the gap between private, owned data centres and the anonymity of public cloud services. The trusted alternative is Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).

Because of its architecture, IaaS is practical and cost-effective, yet still flexible enough to be tailored to customers' needs, unlike on-demand, utility computing services, where the commodity nature of the service comes at a price in terms of flexibility.

Jonathan Bridges is head of service development and Glenn Fitzgerald is lead architect at Fujitsu.

Data Feed

• As a result of the economic downturn, analysts such as IDC reckon information growth has slowed to around 30% a year, down from 60-70% in previous years.

• Data volumes may be growing at around 30% a year, but companies can save up to 40% by outsourcing their data storage to IaaS.

A longer version of this article appears on the Fujitsu website.

Illustration: Andy Martin