CIOs AND IT MANAGERS need a better understanding of cloud computing, according to John Fruehe, Director, Product Marketing, AMD.
Speaking before the GITEX TECHNOLOGY WEEK Cloud Confex which began today, Fruehe said that while virtualization and cloud computing in turn, is becoming the key for efficiency gains for IT departments, many organizations still are not clear on what they should be doing with cloud.
“The reasons all the sessions are full is not that everybody understands exactly what they are doing with cloud computing and they just want to put a fine point on their strategy, they are going to these sessions because they really don’t understand what they are doing,” he said. “Cloud is seen as ‘that thing ‘I have to do, and everyone in the industry is doing it, it will make me more efficient, I just have to figure out how’.”
The current financial environment is a “great equalizer,” Freueh said, in causing people to rethink a lot of IT resources and what they need to do make themselves more efficient. While cloud computing, and the under-pinning virtualization of computing environments offered a lot of potential in terms of efficiency for IT managers, they needed to bear in mind key considerations such as regulatory, legal and security issues, and how they relate to their individual data centres.
AMD is able to work with IT end users to help them with these issues, in part because its technologies like multi-core processors are driving technology growth, and in part because AMD works closely with the large cloud service providers who are building massive data centres based on their microprocessors.
“I think it is so important for people to be here at events like this, to be able to hear what they should be asking for. If you look at a cloud environment, that is uncharted territory so for so many companies. They don’t know what questions to ask, so we have to help them to understand what they should be asking for from their providers, because the things that they ask become the things their providers demand of us.”