Don't go cloud to save, says HP cloud boss

Cost saving should not be the main reason for going into the cloud, according to Steve Dietch, VP of HP's Cloud infrastructure division.

Rather, said Dietch, who was speaking at NetEvents' Asia Pacific conference in Langkawi, Malaysia, enterprises should take it slow and steady, one step at a time. "Everyone wants to talk about cloud but what about security, performance, and management?," he said.

Dietch, who gave a closing keynote speech entitled Getting back to earth, told the audience of press, analysts and industry vendors that people will evolve to cloud at their own speed depending on the business case.

Dietch then talked about how HP was helping customers go to the cloud with its top to bottom datacentre offerings.

Interviewed on the stage by IDC analyst Tim Dillon after his keynote, Dietch said that infrastructure as a service is now very small while software as a service is fairly big, and business process as service is well-established. "Applications that aren't mission-critical or differentiating should go to the cloud," he said.

Asked how many customers would go to the cloud in the next few years, Dietch said that: "almost every enterprise customer will go there as a hybrid model. It will take a long time and it'll happen in a pragmatic, stepwise approach. It's a secular trend."

"The problems I've seen too often -- ten times in the last three months -- is companies too quickly move infrastructure into the cloud without time to improve its credibility, he said. "So my advice is to carve off something such as development and testing, do it fast and then move forward. One message: if you're going to screw it up, screw it up fast so you have time to recover the situation."