Like many current trends in enterprise IT, the adoption of cloud computing first started to gain momentum in the consumer space, with giant businesses who had spare data-center capacity such as Amazon and Google offering public cloud services to customers.

Private individuals — and, increasingly, SMEs — have flocked to the flexible, low-cost services offered by these consumer-focused brands. But large organizations, with a few notable exceptions, have been slow to make the same move. Despite the attractive pricing models of the public cloud, and the appealing capex-to-opex opportunities, two significant barriers to adoption have been standing in the way for many CIOs: reliability and security.

Putting mission-critical ICT operations into the public cloud, where satisfactory SLAs can be vague or even non-existent, is still often seen as a risky maneuver that only the most pioneering — or, some would say, foolhardy — CIO would dare to undertake. Underpinning it all is the fact that levels of service and trust with many cloud providers, which are not primarily geared up as specialist ICT service providers, are simply not high enough.

Now, however, some global ICT companies, such as Fujitsu, are starting to launch their own public cloud services, which could help make cloud adoption more attractive to larger organizations. The long history and “trusted partner” status of many of these companies, coupled with the fact that they take issues such as privacy extremely seriously (see Data Feed, below), may just be the tipping point for a wide-scale move into the cloud.

Fujitsu’s On-Demand Virtual System Service — a pay-as-you-go infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) public cloud — offers, for example, bundled virtualized ICT infrastructure, including server and storage functionality as well as network and security features. Already launched in Japan and due to roll out to Australia, Singapore, the US, the UK and continental Europe by early 2011, it leverages the company’s global IT presence, coupled with its deep technical expertise and recent extensive investment in data centers, to provide a trusted and flexible service to customers.

Commenting on this, Dr. Joseph Reger, CTO of Fujitsu Technology Solutions, argues that it’s important for CIOs to realize not all clouds are the same. “If you don’t read the fine print of the SLAs, it’s very difficult to say what the difference between two clouds is,” he warns. Customers should, he believes, be asking tough questions: “What happens at the end of the contract? Do you get your data back? Or if the company shuts its service down, what then? You could be in for a big surprise.”

Key questions — but once they’ve been satisfactorily addressed, says Reger, cloud usage is all set to become widespread in the enterprise.

Data Feed

Attitudes to personal data in the cloud vary markedly around the world, according to a recent survey by Fujitsu of 6,000 people across 12 countries:

• 89% of consumers questioned 
said they are concerned about who has access to their data.

• People are more willing to trust their bank to keep their data secure than their government.

• Consumers in Germany, China and Japan all have comparatively high levels of trust in companies and rely on them to act on data privacy issues.

• Consumers who are advocates of cloud computing are 41% less likely than the average consumer to worry about the loss of personal data.

• India, China and Brazil have almost twice as many cloud advocates among their Internet users and four times fewer objectors than North America and Western Europe.

• Download the full Fujitsu report here.