CBE, banks to launch card tokenization on Android mobile apps    CIB completes EGP 2.3bn securitization for GlobalCorp in seventh issuance    Mobile wallet transactions in Egypt surge 72% in Q2 2025 to EGP 943.4bn    Right-wing figures blame 'the Left' for Kirk killing, some urge ban on Democratic Party    Ex-IDF chief says Gaza war casualties exceed 200,000, legal advice 'never a constraint'    Egypt's Sisi ratifies €103.5m financial cooperation deal with Germany    Egypt's FM heads to Doha for talks on Israel escalation    Israeli strike in Doha escalates regional tensions, threatens Gaza ceasefire talks    Egypt strengthens inter-ministerial cooperation to upgrade healthcare sector    Egyptian government charts new policies to advance human development    Egypt, Spain discuss expanding health cooperation, support for Gaza    Egypt advances plans to upgrade historic Cairo with Azbakeya, Ataba projects    Egyptian pound ends week lower against US dollar – CBE    Egypt expresses condolences to Sudan after deadly Darfur landslides    Egypt hosts G20 meeting for 1st time outside member states    Lebanese Prime Minister visits Egypt's Grand Egyptian Museum    Egypt to tighten waste rules, cut rice straw fees to curb pollution    Egypt seeks Indian expertise to boost pharmaceutical industry    Egypt prepares unified stance ahead of COP30 in Brazil    Egypt recovers collection of ancient artefacts from Netherlands    Egypt harvests 315,000 cubic metres of rainwater in Sinai as part of flash flood protection measures    Egyptian, Ugandan Presidents open business forum to boost trade    Al-Sisi says any party thinking Egypt will neglect water rights is 'completely mistaken'    Egypt's Sisi, Uganda's Museveni discuss boosting ties    Egypt, Huawei explore healthcare digital transformation cooperation    Foreign, housing ministers discuss Egypt's role in African development push    Greco-Roman rock-cut tombs unearthed in Egypt's Aswan    Egypt reveals heritage e-training portal    Sisi launches new support initiative for families of war, terrorism victims    Egypt expands e-ticketing to 110 heritage sites, adds self-service kiosks at Saqqara    Palm Hills Squash Open debuts with 48 international stars, $250,000 prize pool    On Sport to broadcast Pan Arab Golf Championship for Juniors and Ladies in Egypt    Golf Festival in Cairo to mark Arab Golf Federation's 50th anniversary    Germany among EU's priciest labour markets – official data    Paris Olympic gold '24 medals hit record value    A minute of silence for Egyptian sports    Russia says it's in sync with US, China, Pakistan on Taliban    It's a bit frustrating to draw at home: Real Madrid keeper after Villarreal game    Shoukry reviews with Guterres Egypt's efforts to achieve SDGs, promote human rights    Sudan says countries must cooperate on vaccines    Johnson & Johnson: Second shot boosts antibodies and protection against COVID-19    Egypt to tax bloggers, YouTubers    Egypt's FM asserts importance of stability in Libya, holding elections as scheduled    We mustn't lose touch: Muller after Bayern win in Bundesliga    Egypt records 36 new deaths from Covid-19, highest since mid June    Egypt sells $3 bln US-dollar dominated eurobonds    Gamal Hanafy's ceramic exhibition at Gezira Arts Centre is a must go    Italian Institute Director Davide Scalmani presents activities of the Cairo Institute for ITALIANA.IT platform    







Thank you for reporting!
This image will be automatically disabled when it gets reported by several people.



What does the future hold for cloud computing in Egypt in 2013?
Published in Bikya Masr on 20 - 11 - 2012

CAIRO: Market analysts from leading agencies such as Gartner and IDC have estimated an exponential growth of the cloud market with predictions estimating it to reach a value of $72.9bn by 2015. Companies in Egypt are increasingly venturing into the ‘cloud' to boost revenues, reduce costs and operational complexities and store valuable business data online. As we reach the end of 2012 and head into the next year, George DeBono, General Manager of Red Hat, Middle East and Africa, makes some predictions on what Egyptian enterprises can expect in the cloud computing space in 2013:
Security becomes more consumable.
If you pay any attention whatsoever to tech press coverage and IT industry analyst reports, you know that security concerns about “the cloud" (however that term is being used at the moment) consistently top the list of adoption concerns. Even if naïve cloud safe/unsafe arguments have mostly been retired in favor of more subtle discussions, there's still a lot of complexity and uncertainty.
The IT industry is often dealing with new approaches to computing and delivering application services that don't have clear historical antecedents and established approaches to mitigating associated risk. As a result, dealing with security and associated concerns in the cloud sometimes seem to require true experts in the field, who are almost by definition in fairly short supply.
Organizations like the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) are making concerted efforts to promote the use of best practices for providing security assurance within cloud computing, and to provide education on the uses of cloud computing to help secure additional forms of computing. While the CSA's work benefits everyone, its most important role may be “democratizing" the process of securing and running clouds so that organizations operating and using clouds don't need security rocket scientists on hand. Expect to see tools for more easily and systematically securing clouds gain more attention in 2013.
But data security and privacy remain vexing, and increasingly high-profile, issues.
At one level, protecting against data breaches in the datacenter is a fairly straightforward security problem without many new wrinkles relative to the practices that IT professionals have been following for decades. However, in many respects, we are in a place that's different in kind from times past.
Some of this difference is about connectedness and scale. While security models have been shifting from walled perimeters to defense-in-depth since the early days of the web and e-commerce, cloud-based applications made up of composable services from multiple sources vastly increase potential attack surfaces. It's a vastly more complicated security problem than setting the ports correctly on a firewall.
Expect the overall data security and privacy situation to get worse before it gets better.
Bring-Your-Own-Device doubters reach the fifth step: Acceptance.
BYOD is one of the trends that some like to cite as a key cloud security issue given that it takes control away from IT and puts it in the hands of users. IT professionals often comment along the lines of “Just you wait. Enterprise IT departments are going to come to their senses and take the iPads out of those darned kids." (Or something along those lines)
The thing is that those “darned kids" probably include the CEO and other senior executives. And look around any organization that's not part of the government or in a highly regulated industry and, chances are, most of the smartphones you see aren't company-issued and provisioned.
In most cases, BYOD is going to require IT departments to do some combination of rolling out new products, educating users and adopting new processes. At the very least, they need to understand potential exposures and come up with a plan for dealing with them. But just saying “no" isn't a realistic option for the large majority of organizations. And that means acceptance is the only reasonable path forward.
Hybrid shows up in ever more conversations.
IT consumerization is also one component (though only a component) of another cloud computing trend—hybrid cloud computing. Hybrid commonly refers to cloud management that spans both on-premise (or dedicated resources at a hosting provider) and multi-tenant public clouds—although clouds can be heterogeneous in other ways as well.
The consumerization angle is that early public cloud usage was often characterized by users gaining access to computing resources with a credit card because their IT department wasn't moving quickly enough. Such usage can also be outside the scope of any IT governance practices. That can be good for flexibility and speed but it can have a stark downside if there's a data breach or if an application developed using a public cloud can't be easily put into production on-premise.
The idea behind a hybrid cloud is that resources can be made available to users as easily as if they were accessing a public cloud while keeping the process under centralized policy-based IT management, as you can using Red Hat's CloudForms' open, hybrid cloud management. That's why industry analysts such as Gartner are recommending that organizations “design private cloud deployments with interoperability and future hybrid in mind." Expect to hear even more about hybrid clouds in the coming year.
OpenStack demonstrates the power of community innovation.
Openness is one of the most important enablers of hybrid IT because it helps users avoid lock-in to vendors and specific ecosystems. And not just open source but openness across multiple dimensions including APIs, standards and the requirement that permission to use intellectual property, like copyrights and patents, must be granted in ways that make the technology open and accessible to the user. Openness is also about having vibrant, upstream communities that are at the heart of the innovation that the open source development model makes possible.
The OpenStack Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) project is a great example of community-driven development. 2013 is going to see all that developer involvement lead to commercial product in the same way that the open source development model has led to innovative products in operating systems, middleware and countless other areas.
Private (and hybrid) Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) goes mainstream.
Like other aspects of cloud computing, PaaS has evolved in response to the market. The basic idea of PaaS—that many application developers don't want to be exposed to and have to deal with the underlying operating system and associated plumbing—remains in place. However, PaaS platforms that limit developers to a specific language on a specific hosting platform have only seen lukewarm acceptance.
However, for many organizations, moving all of their development into a public cloud is too big a step even if they can choose their tools. Alternatively, they may simply not want to give up some of the features, such as auto-scaling and application multi-tenancy, that a PaaS can provide once they move an application into production on-premise.
Thus, as has been the case with Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), we expect that PaaS is going to increasingly be seen not just as a public cloud capability, but as a private and hybrid one. Perhaps even primarily as private and hybrid, at least as far as enterprise application development is concerned. There are already some early examples of private PaaS in the market but the trend is going to really accelerate in 2013.


Clic here to read the story from its source.