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Cloudy Ireland

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In Ireland, the cloud computing industry has created many job opportunities. For example, Oracle has created 450 roles in Dublin at the beginning of 2016. (Raidió Teilifís Éireann. 2016)

Since 2012, multinationals such as Google, Total Defense (cloud security) and many more well-known cloud brands had chosen Ireland as their data centres location. Geologically, Ireland’s climate would greatly help to cool down the infrastructures, and in terms of labour, Ireland can provide the essential educated workforce. Combining different factors, Ireland is a suitable data centre location and it’s these data centres that support these “opportunities and what the companies are doing, the data centres are the critical piece of infrastructure that the cloud depends on.” (Kennedy, John. 2012)

To promote and increase job opportunities, during 2012 the Irish government had funded a 1.2million euro cloud computing program. The investment funded a research centre located at Dublin City University, and the research “accelerates the development and adoption of Cloud technology and show cases Ireland’s capabilities in this field.” (The Irish Centre for Cloud Computing & Commerce. 2015).

This greatly increase Ireland’s competitiveness internationally because this action indicate stable supply of educated labour, up-to-date technology and government is supportive in this sector.

As time passed different corporations continue to invest cloud technology in Ireland. One of the example is Vodafone Cloud.

On 24th August 2015, Vodafone Ireland announced it would invest 7million euros “ The move is part of Vodafone’s plan to beef up its cloud and hosting business in Europe.” (O’Brien, Ciara. 2015). This investment was supposed to introduce new services “include everything from co-location, managed hosting, private cloud and infrastructure as a service (IaaS).”. However, since the 1st of November 2015 Vodafone cloud has closed (Vodafone. 2015). Currently, Vodafone launched Vodafone Backup+ as a replacement of Vodafone Cloud and this new service is in partnership with Dropbox. Vodafone’s action has raised speculations on why they closed down Vodafone Cloud and then introduced Vodafone Backup+.

Is this because of lack of customers? Too many competitions in Ireland? Or is it because it is more cost efficient to provide cloud services through partnership with Dropbox? However, there is no definite answer as Vodafone’s spokesperson “would not disclose how many consumers were using Cloud but insists Backup+ is a more convenient service.” (Gilbert, Paula. 2015)

Similar to Vodafone, companies such as CloudStrong, Irish cloud technology company (CloudStrong. 2016), had partnered with Microsoft as a hosting partner. Would this kind of partnership between firms indicate the cloud sector in Ireland is experiencing increased competition?

Apart from competitive opponents, cloud providers such as Microsoft and Google would also need to face some real issues due to The Safe Harbour agreement between the United States and European Union.

As an E.U. country, E.U. regulations would affect Ireland. This new agreement, EU – US Privacy Shield, is the replacement of The Safe Harbour agreement and thus, would affect privacy regulations and legal data transfer between the United States and the European Union.

Yet, transferring data disregarding the locations is the essence of cloud computing. If, data transfer between countries are now restricted by regulations then cloud computing’s advantages would diminished. (Linthicum, David. 2016)

It seems Ireland’s cloud sector would remain cloudy until the EU – US Privacy Shield is fully review. But for Ireland to remain an ideal cloud location, it will depend on the impact of the new agreement and the competitiveness of Ireland in the international cloud market.

References:

  1. RTE.ie,. “Oracle Expansion To Create 450 Dublin Jobs“. N.p., 2016. Web. 4 Mar. 2016.
  2. Lillington, Karlin. “Technology Giant Oracle To Create 450 New Jobs In Dublin“. The Irish Times. N.p., 2016. Web. 4 Mar. 2016.
  3. Kennedy, John. “Can Ireland Be The European Capital Of Cloud Computing? – Enterprise | Siliconrepublic.Com – Ireland’s Technology News Service”. Silicon Republic. N.p., 2012. Web. 4 Mar. 2016.
  4. “About | Research And Innovation | IC4 Cloud Computing”. ie. N.p., 2015. Web. 4 Mar. 2016.
  5. O’Brien, Ciara. “Vodafone Investing €7M In Data Centre Services“. The Irish Times. N.p., 2015. Web. 5 Mar. 2016.
  6. Gilbert, Paula. “Vodafone Cloud Shutting Down“. ITWeb Technology News. N.p., 2015. Web. 5 Mar. 2016.
  7. “Cloud Computing Services Ireland, Our Cloud Solutions“. CloudStrong. N.p., 2016. Web. 5 Mar. 2016.
  8. GILBERT, DAVID. “Safe Harbor 2.0: Confusion Reigns As US, EU Send Mixed Messages Over ‘Privacy Shield’ Data-Sharing Rules“. International Business Times. N.p., 2016. Web. 5 Mar. 2016.
  9. Linthicum, David. “Data Isolationism Will Hold Back The Cloud”. InfoWorld. N.p., 2016. Web. 13 Mar. 2016.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Private Cloud?

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Private cloud computing, or corporation cloud computing as it is sometimes referred to, was mentioned as one of the four deployment models in our first post.

Compared with public cloud computing, private cloud computing offers corporations greater privacy and higher level of security as the cloud technology is implemented to the corporation’s network, i.e. hosted within the corporation’s firewall. Private clouds also offer the corporation greater control to its data because the data in the cloud are maintained and managed by the corporation’s staff.

Alternatively, corporations can choose a suitable cloud service provider to host the corporation’s data, but hosting data with a provider sometimes can cause concern over the breach in security even though most of the time providers would keep in pace with evolving security while sometimes internal cloud do not. However, for some corporations an external cloud is preferable as they can be small to medium businesses or the company has an incredible amount of data that needs to store. Often times, corporations would also choose a provider based on the services the provider offers, for example, Toyota uses Microsoft Azure cloud services for Windows’ virtualisation technology (Microsoft, 2016) and below is the quote from the general manager of Toyota.

“Windows Azure lets us maintain around-the-clock uptime, which is crucial for a global business… It gives us a flexibility that was unthinkable in the era of on-premises deployments.”

Hidehiko Sasaki

General Manager, Internet Planning Department, e-TOYOTA Division, Toyota (Toyota, 2013)

Perspectives

Recently, many corporations and organisations introduced private cloud services, at the moment providers, like Microsoft, are aiming to gain market share in this sector by providing private and hybrid cloud services and platforms.

From management’s perspective, whether private cloud services are hosted internally or externally, it is a type of technology that is worth to invest. Cloud technology provides many advantages to the corporation, for example cost reduction, but most importantly time saving. After all, as the old saying says:

Time is Money

Using cloud services would mean the corporation’s staff would be able to access files anywhere via their mobile devices, this would, for example, reduce the waiting time due to communication between the employees, in a scenario where some employees are in the office and need to communicate with the project leader, who is out of the office, both sides would have access to the questioned file and solve it simultaneously.

However, is the management’s perspective regarding cost saving and time efficient accurate?

Looking at the other side of the coin, research conducted by BT Ireland and Amarách reveals that keeping pace with technology is challenging for employees and some even found technology as “significant disruption in IT department” (Amárach, 2016). Considering the survey’s result, would private cloud services really be “An efficient, highly available environment for high frequency data processing, sharing or managing” (Hosting Ireland, 2016) and many more for the employees and corporations, just like the providers had advertised?

Private or Hybrid Cloud?

In reality, most of the corporations used hybrid cloud services instead of solely private cloud. After all, it would be very difficult to have all of the corporation’s compute resources integrate into their private cloud. (Maguire, 2013)

Realistically, most of the private clouds are actually a part of a hybrid cloud deployment. For example, by using sales automation software from vendors such as SugarCRM and many more,  the company no longer stays in their own datacenter, but instead the data are managed by these vendors. This is a classic SaaS or public cloud service.

Also, in hybrid cloud the concept of sensitive and less sensitive data allow the corporations to store their less sensitive data in a public cloud, a more cost efficient service, and sensitive data such as personnel data on the private cloud.

Thus, compared with hybrid cloud, private cloud offers less flexibility to the users. And in a survey conducted by IDG and published by Informatica, about 74% of the 200 IT and business decision makers “said they expect to adopt a hybrid or cloud-only approach to analytics over the next three years.” (McKendrick, 2016)

Reference:

  1. Azure.microsoft.com,. “Toyota”. N.p., 2016. Web. 7 Feb. 2016.Available at: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/case-studies/customer-stories-toyota/
  2.  Talbot, Chris. N.p., 2016. Web. 7 Feb. 2016. Available at: http://talkincloud.com/hybrid-cloud-computing/102214/microsoft-rolls-out-azure-private-cloud-hybrid-environments
  3. Microsoft.com,. “Virtualization And Private Cloud | Microsoft”. N.p., 2016. Web. 7 Feb. 2016.Available at: https://www.microsoft.com/en/server-cloud/solutions/virtualization-private-cloud.aspx
  4. Amarach.com,. “IT Disrupting Itself | Amarach Research”. N.p., 2016. Web. 7 Feb. 2016. Available at: http://www.amarach.com/blog/2015/12/it-disrupting-itself.html
  5. Hostingireland.ie,. “Private Cloud Services – Hosting Ireland’s Private Cloud Service”. N.p., 2016. Web. 7 Feb. 2016.Available at: https://www.hostingireland.ie/private-cloud.php
  6. Maguire, James. “What Is Private Cloud – Datamation”. Datamation.com. N.p., 2016. Web. 7 Feb. 2016. Available at: http://www.datamation.com/cloud-computing/what-is-private-cloud.html
  7. Downing, Daniel. “What Is Your Cloud Vision?”. Perspectives.tieto.com. N.p., 2015. Web. 7 Feb. 2016. Available at:  http://perspectives.tieto.com/blog/2015/05/what-is-your-cloud-vision/
  8. McKendrick, Joe. “Forbes Welcome”. Forbes.com. N.p., 2016. Web. 7 Feb. 2016. Available at: http://www.forbes.com/sites/joemckendrick/2016/02/06/cloud-computing-becomes-a-home-for-data-analytics/#654a4bb66a95