Storage association SNIA have used the tenth anniversary of Frankfurt trade show Powering The Cloud to voice concerns over cloud computing uptake.
SNIA – Storage Networking Industry Association – are a European user education and standards development firm.
Bob Plumridge, Chairman of the Board, SNIA, said, “Mystery still surrounds certain aspects of cloud, but the main issues now are who is using it, what are they are doing with it, and how it is being implemented. Businesses are interested in what aspects of it are working well, and what aren’t.
“What has happened with the NSA Prism scandal may make people reconsider their options. Having said that I do think that through education people can be made confident that property is secure, and they may double-check decisions and assess what their partners can offer. I do think Prism will affect the uptake of cloud. Not necessarily the private cloud, but certainly in terms of the public and private clouds.”
Plumridge fondly recalls the transformation of Powering The Cloud, and how it is able to inform people of such security issues, “It is completely different now than when it started. In its inception it was a purely hardware-based show; disk drives, cash memories, that sort of thing. People weren’t too bothered with security back then.
“Those shows were showing comparatively basic things. Now we focus largely on things like cloud and big data, which were not even dreamt of then. From our point of view can offer a huge amount of vendor-neutral information on these topics. The show provides a great opportunity for vendors to speak directly with one another and see what’s going on.”
