25 Mar 2010

Cloud, virtualisation 'offer business advantages'

Cloud computing and virtualisation technology offer many advantages to businesses but firms till need to ensure they are using the right IT infrastructure to fulfil their needs, it has been claimed.

Owen Cole, UK & Ireland technical director for F5 Networks, statedin a blog post for Security Park that up to 40 per cent of all servers are now either virtualised or cloud-based and this can provide benefits, but also drawbacks that businesses need to be aware of.

He wrote: "The benefits of virtualisation are obvious. But every technology implementation needs to be weighed up in terms of the potential challenges and benefits, and virtualisation is no different."

Elsewhere, Simon Heron, internet security analyst at Network Box, recently said the third-party aspect of the cloud could make it increasingly difficult to ensure adequate precautions are taken for confidentiality.

Therefore, businesses have been advised that the popularity of the cloud computing IT model could pose a serious problem for data security over the coming 12 months.