Cloud

South African cloud services get less nebulous

What do customers want from cloud? How should local vendors give it to them? The answers are not easy.

01 February 2012

Cloud computing offerings from vendors have divided into two camps: those in which the vendor controls the entire stack from top to bottom with large potential benefits in integration and performance but at a risk of lock-in, and those that have a mix-and-match approach where freedom to choose components and services comes first, but with more integration and tweaking work possibly needed. Is one or the other approach the winner? Or will there be room for both? Does the definition of cloud exclude a top-to-bottom implementation by a single vendor, or does it not matter? Brainstorm asked a number of local vendors and service providers to explain their cloud offerings. Marc Dijkstra, solution architect at Symantec SA, says his company has 14 or 15 products on the cloud portfolio spread around its 16 datacentres worldwide.

“Locally, we have put nine metric tons of equipment into Internet Solutions’ datacentre, with the services being pushed through our channel,” he says.

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