Recent reports have shown that companies are shying away from the public cloud due to security concerns, but how accurate are the results and what, if any, are the alternatives?

A committee of CIOs met in Singapore last week. The committee compromised of C-Level executives from the leading companies across Asia to highlight its continual growth of APAC and better understand how to utilize the increasing opportunities to encourage new technology projects, greater business collaboration and maintain growth.

Among the attendees was Alex Siow the head of business Excellence System Technology & CIO at Starhub and Avery Palos CIO Asia at General Electric and Kevin Noonan Research Director at Ovum opened discussions.

"As information technology leaders in Asia, we have the difficult job of representing not only our business interest in the region; but also acting as the bridge head for communications with our multinational parent organizations. Communicating and adapting bilateral needs between our local markets and global corporations is a critical skill for CIO's to master. Leaning in favor too far in one direction or the other can risk your reputation and make it difficult to accomplish your goals. By carefully balancing between the two worlds you can position yourself in the organization to be a key player for future growth and understanding."

APAC has been facing difficult challenges as it grows and develops and doubts over the political and governmental structure of the region have been raised. To overcome this, incredible drive and enthusiasm to succeed has been seen by large enterprises and APAC can confidently compete with the US and Europe within the telecoms sector.

The cloud offers fantastic opportunity to transform business but discussing the right implications and techniques are vital for a cloud which works throughout the region and offers the same opportunities for all industries. The cloud really will be the next big thing in IT.

"We are at the beginning of the largest and most beneficial wave of change ever to hit the IT industry. This new wave, known as cloud computing, is a new approach to IT that reduces IT complexity, lowers IT costs, improves quality of service, and enables greater IT and business agility." Tim Posney - Regional CTO APAC, ING Investment Management

Cloud computing is set to deliver these benefits by leveraging the efficient pooling of an on demand, self managed, virtual IT infrastructure that can be delivered and consumed as a service. It's commonly accepted that the cloud is the future of data storage but as cloud security is called into question the CIO Committee announced that investing in the private cloud is preferable. The private cloud enables businesses to capture all the benefits of the cloud without losing control of your IT and without increasing your risk.

"Cloud computing is a transformative technology. It is built differently from traditional IT, enabling dynamic pools of virtualized resources. It is operated differently, enabling end-to-end service delivery. And it is consumed differently, making it convenient for IT organizations and for those they support. To unleash its full potential, companies need to recognize that cloud computing is a better investment strategy for IT, and one that can enable them to achieve faster and higher returns on their IT investments." Harmeen Mehta - MD and CIO Global Markets APAC, Bank of America

Organizations such as GE - Avery Palos, CIO Asia, StarHub - Alex Siow, Head Business Excellence and Systems Technology, Bharti Airtel - Rupinder Goel, CIO, ING Investment Management - Tim Posney, CTO APAC and Pfizer - Sirsij Peshin, CIO / VP Business Technology all agreed at the CIO Asia Summit that they must cautiously prepare for growth while evolving their methods of technology implementation. In 2010-2011, CIOs will actively strategize their accelerated IT spending to balance cost and risk while pursuing significant growth. Really a Private Cloud is the only option.

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