MANILA, Philippines — Recent incidents displaying the pitfalls of public cloud computing is not stopping DataOne, a young cloud provider based in the Philippines, from being optimistic about the prospects of the local cloud market.
During Thursday’s launch of DataOne’s cloud offering, called CloudSecure, executives downplayed the dampening effects of recent and past cloud outages in Amazon and Google’s data centers, stressing how services are bound to have downtimes since no system is perfectly immune from it.
It will be remembered that last month, one of Amazon’s data centers in the US suffered from prolonged downtime due to power storms, taking popular Internet services such as Instagram, Flipboard, and Pinterest with it for more than 24 hours.
“The main reason why we have acquired more customers over the years is [because] our infrastructure is still more reliable than theirs,” said Cyril Rocke, president and chief executive officer of Data One Asia.
A company-managed infrastructure is not going to be the best, Rocke said, because it’s very hard to reach the highest level of security, redundancy, and design in data centers — something, which public cloud providers can deliver on.
Though public cloud providers sometimes suffer from unexpected downtimes due to unforeseen events, Rocke claimed that DataOne’s track record over the years has delivered on a 99.99 percent uptime guarantee.
The DataOne executive likewise stressed that the company’s main data center in Libis is backed by big-name brands in the technology industry, including Hitachi, Cisco, and most recently, Microsoft, and has sufficient redundant and back-up systems to immediately recover from any possible downtimes.
But negative perceptions of the cloud are the least of DataOne’s problems in providing services in the country, Rocke said. “The biggest challenge we face today is education,” he admitted. “Migration from physical to virtual environments often leads to some misconceptions. Customers are surprised that most of their apps can run on much smaller footprints.”
Additionally, DataOne faces stiff competition from the more established public cloud providers today, such as Amazon and Google. Rocke admits it’s going to be an uphill battle for a Philippine-based cloud provider to take on such technology giants in the cloud field, but he underscored a number of factors that put the company at an advantage.
“We are competing against giants, and they have the scale and the ability to be extremely aggressive with price,” he said. “Even before we started, we already analyzed whether we could compete with [them]. I said, if we cannot be close to them [in price], then there’s no point in building it.”
Data sovereignty, Rocke said, is also an “important component” of the cloud, considering the complicated legal dynamics of the Internet. Aside from preventing exposure to latency, signing up for a cloud service in-country shields companies from the prying eyes of foreign governments.
“If your data is in a foreign country, the law that applies to access of data is the laws of that country. If it’s in the US, [your data] will be subjected to the Patriot Act, [which] allows the US government to check and have access to your data,” he warned, adding that positioning DataOne as an in-country offer only subjects them to the privacy laws in the Philippines.
This is one of the reasons, according to Rocke, that one government agency had already decided to jump on to DataOne’s cloud.
Aside from providing utility-based infrastructure capacity to local businesses, DataOne also has software offerings in the cloud, including popular Microsoft enterprise applications such as Exchange, SharePoint, and Lync.
Last month, the company signed an affiliate agreement with Bayan Communications, which allows the latter to sell CloudSecure offerings to its customers and enable DataOne to tap into the telco’s vast roster of clients.
“The company is definitely bullish on the [local] market,” Rocke declared. “I see the demand rising both from the corporate and government sectors. Clearly, opportunities are rife for the company.”
DataOne, a company established by the Keppel Group of Singapore, has been providing IT and data infrastructure support to a wide range of businesses in the country with the launch of its data center here in 2002.
In 2007, it launched an enterprise voice service under the brand name VoiceOne.
All its facilities are housed in its tier-3 and ISO-certified headquarters in Quezon City.
source: interaksyon.com
