David McCloskey, director of product marketing and business operations, Intel Asia-Pacific
What is one thing that will define 2012?
2012 is all about data explosion. According to IDC, there will be a billion more Internet users, 15 billion connected devices, 670 percent more storage capacity and 1,000 exabytes of Internet traffic in three years' time, and these show consumers are driving adoption and use of cloud technologies.
The dramatic increase in mobile Internet use and the demands placed on viewing and using content from the cloud, any time and any where, are just examples of how people are driving cloud use, For instance, Facebook has grown to more than 800 million active users, serves up 600,000 photos per second and 3.5 billion pieces of content shared per week among users. To deal with this growth, it has scaled to 30,000 servers and plans to add another 20,000 in less than 18 months.
Internet video is also expected to account for over 50 percent of the consumer Internet traffic this year, with a good amount of these in high-definition.
According to our internal research, for every 600 smartphones or 122 tablets sold, an Intel Xeon-based server needs to be installed to service the applications that will run on these devices. This trend will continue and likely accelerate this year, and we expect cloud-related Intel Xeon processor shipments to quadruple in the next five years.
How do you see cloud computing fare this year?
There is no denying that practically every business is moving to the cloud or is at least experimenting with it. In a recent worldwide survey of over 800 senior executives, KPMG found that 41 percent of respondents said they are using or plan to use some kind of private cloud and 30 percent said they either are or have plans to use a public cloud.
From our perspective, the majority of businesses in the Asia-Pacific region will still favor hybrid cloud deployments this year. For those that need to bring a service or offering to market quickly, have few regulatory hurdles and are using data that need not be tightly integrated with other parts of the business, however, are turning to public cloud offerings from vendors such as Amazon Web Services (AWS).
There is still a lot of concern and criticism about public cloud due to its lack of interoperability, fear of vendor lock-in and security risks. But initiatives such as the Open Data Center Alliance, which provide an open platform for cloud providers to interoperate, help to mitigate some of these concerns.
Irrespective of how businesses decide to move to the cloud though, one thing is clear: companies are moving to the cloud this year.
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