BANGALORE, INDIA: 'Cloud is the big switch, which would enable ubiquitous infrastructure worldwide for information technology,' said Bob Supnik, vice president of engineering and supply chain/ CTO, Unisys Technology.

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While delivering the key note address at the Grand Finale of Unisys Cloud 20/20 Technical Paper Contest, Supnik noted that in the past industry has witnessed a shift from mainframe to client-server and the boom of Internet and the next paradigm shift is the cloud computing.

“Ten years down the lane, companies that are purchasing and owning would move to renting and using IT,” he said.

“Cloud is a notion of self-services. It is management of self-provisioned IT,” added  Shubhashis Sengupta, architect, Oracle Service Engineering.

Having its own benefits such as agility, speedy deployment and cost-effectiveness, cloud computing also poses challenges as well as concerns.

According to Sengupta, data security, problem with quality of services due to heavy outages, reliability, etc are some of the concerns.

Issues such as power management, networking, efficiency, reliability etc are critical for the structure of data-center over the cloud. Another challenge is management of the middleware and tools, which can be addressed through automation.

“Automation is required across different service providers, because cloud is not going to be built under one piece of software or infrastructure,” said Supnik.

The next problem is building programs that scales with cloud. Applications developed today are all custom built. There is no model that can be re-deployed or re-used.

Security and maintenance pose as the biggest challenges, as the Internet is un-safe today. Cloud can be an attractive target for cyber-criminals as millions of user data is stored.

According to Supnik, the question is about giving right data to the right person at the right time. There is a need to figure out ways for maintaining the confidentiality.

“One needs to solve all these issues. Addressing one particular issue and failing others won't do,” he added.