Irish firms are exploring how public cloud can help them develop fast with no distractions, says IBM’s Ronan Dalton [pictured].

“Enterprise in Ireland predominantly embraces private cloud at the moment, but they’re hearing about the benefits of public cloud too and are eager to find out more,” he explains.

Cloud technology has become a staple resource for most businesses in Ireland, particularly startups, who are embracing it with aplomb.

Ronan Dalton, IBM’s Cloud Computing Leader for Ireland, says that a notable area of exploration for Irish companies concerns private and public cloud and the benefits of supplementing the former with the latter.

Private And Public

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Private cloud typically comprises single-tenant setups, using either on-premise data storage, a local data centre managed by a third party, or else cloud-enabled data centres. Public cloud is multi-tenanted, providing services that are delivered online by third-party providers.

According to Dalton, organisations in Ireland are especially interested in improving scalability and agility, and public cloud can deliver these improvements.

“They want the opportunity to try fast and fail fast if they’re looking to develop new applications and build new business models. Cloud — and public cloud in particular — will allow them to do that with lower barriers to entry.

“Public cloud can allow businesses to be disruptors in their respective sectors. Think of WhatsApp and its impact on messaging. Running on IBM Cloud, WhatsApp allows people all over the world to send messages to one another across IP networks, as opposed to sending messages in SMS format. Cloud is the enabler here. New business models are formed as organisations innovate without buying hardware or software; they simply pay for what’s consumed as required.”

IBM Solutions

Dalton says that the growing interest in public cloud solutions has seen a surge in business for two of IBM’s products — SoftLayer and Bluemix. SoftLayer is a cloud services provider that was acquired by IBM in 2013. Its extensive range of services includes bare metal and virtual servers, networking, turnkey big data solutions and private cloud solutions.

A key differentiator for SoftLayer, according to Dalton, is its ability to provide physical machines for cloud clients.

“As well as providing virtual machines as required, SoftLayer allows customers to have a dedicated physical machine just for them, allowing them to build a private cloud on SoftLayer’s infrastructure.

“Another advantage is SoftLayer’s global private network, on which its infrastructure is built. Competitors will typically charge for data centre to data centre workload traffic. SoftLayer provides this with no charge — we’re very transparent on the pricing model.”

Virtual or physical machines can be hired through SoftLayer either by the month or the hour, which is ideal for businesses that want to use private or public cloud for intense bursts of activity. “That way, a high performance workload can be undertaken in a defined, fine-grained way, where customers only have to pay by the hour,” says Dalton.

PaaS

Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) is a solution typically sourced in public cloud. IBM’s Bluemix is a popular offering and is based on Cloud Foundry, an open-source de facto standard for PaaS solutions. Bluemix is also run on SoftLayer’s infrastructure.

“With Bluemix, application developers can leverage a suite of services from IBM and partners in building their applications,” Dalton explains. “It allows an application developer to focus on the task at hand while Bluemix takes care of things like building your software environment, getting your database and app servers in place etc. You can just write the code for your app and avail of the supporting services as you need them through Bluemix.”

IBM uses a flexible pricing model for Bluemix, with free access to services up to varying thresholds, and the option of pay-as-you-go or subscription thereafter. Bluemix can also be integrated into a customer’s on-premise IT, where data is sensitive but a PaaS service is required.

While the rate of cloud adoption differs between Irish businesses, Dalton says that most are already on the road. “The enterprise sector is starting to explore public cloud benefits more, while mid-tier organisations are further along the adoption curve. Startups are going straight to SoftLayer and Bluemix so that they can build and prototype their applications quickly.”