CIO East Africa today hosted its second Executive Breakfast series amid calls for organisations to adopt cloud computing. The event—held under the theme Cloud Computing: How do I get into the cloud? and sponsored by Safaricom, the Kenya ICT Board, Dimension Data and Cisco brought together 90 participants including CEOs, CIOc, CTOs and IT managers from local companies as well as overseas.  In his welcome remarks, CIO East Africa Editorial Director Harry Hare stated that ICT departments were increasingly coming under pressure to deliver more business value while at the same time struggling with meagre resources, forcing them to start looking at cloud computing as an option.

In his presentation, Den Sullivan, Cisco's CIO for emerging markets, an area which covers 132 countries stretching from Chile to Russia, stated that cloud computing was still a misty area with most people still uncertain about the cloud. He defined the three types of cloud computing as Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). He also expounded on the components of cloud computing including its key characteristics, deployment models, delivery models, payment plans and management.

He reiterated that productivity, growth and innovation are key drivers for cloud computing. 

“Businesses benefit from cloud computing by having their time to market reduced as computing in the cloud eliminates processes such as setting up of software resources and hardware procurement. Cloud computing can also reduce capital expenditure costs by about 50”, said Sullivan.

He said that  Cisco as a company has saved over US$350 Million through telepresence solutions.

Safaricom's CIO, Robert Mugo who gave a user's perspective of how cloud computing works, said:  "Traditional computing approach is unfeasible due to time taken to deliver hardware" .

Safaricom's Chief Technology Officer John Barorot gave a presentation on how Safaricom was integratin cloud computing solutions into their operations. Barorot said that Safaricom leased fibre from multiple providers which they use to carry their bandwidth while enhancing redundancy at the same time. Safaricom has adopted Multi Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) for their connection between major cities which has various advantages over Internet Protocol (IP). MPLS  fowards traffic based on labels instead of source and destination addresses which helps in enhancing efficiency.

Delving on the security perspectives of the cloud, George Murage from Dimension Data noted that  the security goals of cloud computing include confidentitality, integrity and availability while the pain points include loss of control, de-perimeterization(lack of clear boundaries), API(Application Programming Interface) Security and compliance and legal issues. Murage emphasised on the need for data centers to be built away from the Metropolitan to shield them from disasters and the need for datacentres hosting local content to be hosted locally to save on international bandwidth costs.

More details and interviews from the second CIO Executive Breakfast Series will be available in the July issue of CIO East Africa magazine. Presentations and videos from the event will aslo be available online shortly.