ePLDT unit sees cloud adoption in Phl accelerating this year

MANILA, Philippines - IP Converge Data Services Inc. (IPC), a unit of dominant carrier Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co. (PLDT), expects cloud adoption in the Philippines further accelerating this year due to higher demand from corporate clients.

Niño Valmonte, IPC director for product management and marketing, said the Philippines would continue to see high demand for private clouds as security remains a major hindrance to cloud adoption in the country.

Valmonte pointed out that more and more enterprises would choose to implement private clouds where dedicated cloud infrastructure is used for a single customer.

“We recognize that there are indeed sectors that would always require single-tenancy for their cloud strategy and a private cloud setup allows them to apply their own security measures on a dedicated hardware resource, yet still have the flexibility of compute as a service,” he said.

IPC’s cloud.com.ph allows customers to set up their cloud resources as they see fit, and even allows them to subscribe to server-level security services such as managed endpoint protection and critical systems protection from global leader in data security Symantec.

Enterprises with stringent security protocols include financial and government organizations.

A large percentage of data from these sectors, being highly sensitive, may not be hosted in shared physical infrastructure and thus entail a private cloud setup to maintain utmost data integrity while still taking advantage of the cloud’s flexibility.

Other enterprises that would require a private cloud setup are those with legacy systems designed for client/server implementations and cannot be deployed via virtualized infrastructure.

A survey by the Asia Cloud Computing Association (ACCA) showed that the Philippines moved two notches to 10th place from 12th in their Asian cloud readiness index in 2014.

This rate of improvement was the same last year as the Philippines jumped from the bottom of the list at 14th place to 12th place.

The ePLDT unit said the growth this year would be driven by a realization of businesses that aside from on-demand computing resources being indeed reliable, cost-efficient, and the easiest and fastest to deploy, taking advantage of the cloud doesn’t require one to move entire systems and business operations all at once.

In particular, 2014 would see enterprises implementing more cost effective and creative solutions to suit their needs utilizing both private and public clouds.

By customizing workloads over a hybrid cloud, an enterprise is able to manage systems in both cloud-based or hosted environments whether off-site or on-premise.

IT administrators are able to monitor systems on different infrastructures from a single management platform, ensuring that all aspects of the business are well coordinated.

“It is always good to use a cloud provider that also operates its own data center facility. This gives customers the option of doing straightforward data center co-location, cloud hosting, or go for a hybrid setup. We are able to do this at IPC and in fact, advise customers on how to implement a business cloud strategy that they feel comfortable and secure with,” Valmonte said.