Hurdles to cloud adoption start to tumble

Vendors look to address security and performance fears.

Vendors are moving to address two of the greatest concerns about cloud computing reported by CIOs - security and compliance.

Novell was the latest to announce plans to join systems management software vendors such as BMC, CA and IBM in developing tools to manage intelligent workloads.

This software would accelerate adoption of cloud services, said Greg Cullen, PlateSpin's regional director for Australia and New Zealand.

"There's a great opportunity for us in enablement," said Cullen. "It's a good thing for the channel community because it helps them accelerate the [cloud services] market."

Generally, a workload consists of an operating system, middleware and an application.

An intelligent workload can comprise a collection of services; using a database from inside a company, with an application provided by a cloud service and middleware from an external cloud, said Cullen.

Novell's tools were intended to "replicate the security and compliance posture beyond the firewall", said Cullen, by wrapping security and compliance restrictions around an intelligent workload so it could safely draw on external resources.

"You may have key workloads that are particularly important to you, for example a billing system, and it needs more resources. If you are sure of the security and compliance you can push that out" to a cloud computing provider, said Cullen. 

IT services company Unisys told CRN last month that it was also basing its cloud computing services around security concerns.