Much of the talk in the press now is of Cloud Computing and the benefits this can bring. NTT Europe Online sees this as an evolutionary step along the road towards increasing flexibility, driving down costs and providing Infrastructure as a Service, transferring costs that were traditionally capital expenditure into a predictable monthly operational spend.

As an experienced provider of infrastructure to online businesses of many shapes and sizes for more than 10 years, NTT Europe Online already has many customers which are benefiting from  services such as  SaaS platforms and virtualization and we see our Private Cloud solution (to be announced later in 2009) as offering further flexibility and security to support online business.  

The Private Cloud solution will allow customers to allocate resources as appropriate between many online environments:

• Live( production)
• Pre-production/Testing
• Customer Trials
• Business continuity and Disaster Recovery
• Development Playgrounds / Sandboxes

NTT Europe Online recently commissioned Vanson Bourne to carry out research into the receptiveness of the marketplace to the concept of Cloud Computing. 200 CIOs and CFOs at large UK businesses were polled and their responses were fascinating:

67% were either not planning to adopt cloud computing or unsure whether their organisations would adopt

And yet at the same time…

85% were looking for more flexibility in their software licensing agreements

And…

68% said they would avoid long term IT contracts

…benefits widely acknowledged to be delivered by the Cloud Computing model.