With cloud computing emerging as a business necessity in both the private and public sectors, Deputy Executive Director Asec. Nicolas Ojeda, Jr. of the Department of Science and Technology (DOST) – ICT Office reaffirmed the government’s drive to propagate the use of technology at all levels of governance during the recently held Philippine Cloud Summit, hosted by local cloud services provider IP Converge Data Services, Inc.
He mentioned the government’s recognition that through cloud usage, “a whole new range of possibilities for delivering services has emerged, offering great scope for the expansion of internet services in the country.”
“Our government is developing the Government Cloud or GovCloud. It is basically a hybrid cloud, combining both public and private clouds – in order to enable an efficient collaboration between agencies and our partners in the private sector, while allowing for professional delivery of services as well as content,” Ojeda revealed.
A project by the Integrated Government Philippines (iGovPhil Project), the GovCloud is a full-service cloud-based productivity suite that includes apps such as web hosting, email, collaboration, project management, a payment gateway and more. Ojeda said that the hybrid cloud has the potential to be the largest in the country, connecting more than 160 agencies and offices to the GovCloud. Currently, it hosts 132 virtual machines (VMs) for 19 government agencies, giving the government the economic advantages of using the cloud platform.
“Our endeavors to harness the potential of broadband and the cloud, should be perceived by our forthcoming generations with pride. We, at the ICT Office, are of course passionate about the emerging world of ICTs, and hope that our programs and projects will benefit everyone throughout the country,” Ojeda said.
The summit, attended by representatives from the government and business sectors, brought together a wide network of IT practitioners who shared their experiences, knowledge and trends under a banner of information and education within the industry.
Keynote speaker Randy Bias of Cloudscaling, a cloud computing pioneer in the United States, advised local enterprises to develop a sense of urgency in harnessing the power of the cloud in order to develop the necessary agility and flexibility in meeting the challenges of the changing global marketplace. He cited Netflix and Samsung as two examples whose business grew exponentially when they took their business model onto the cloud platform. Resource speaker Joey Gurango from the Philippine Software Industry Association (PSIA) noted that IT experts “are supposed to add value to business and not be in the business of managing tech.”
During the open forum, it was discussed that some decision-makers are hesitant to move to the cloud for security reasons. “Your biggest security threat is the people inside your company, not outside,” Gurango responded. He then cited a company that insisted on exercising data sovereignty for their data needs by having their servers on site, yet employees would send files among themselves using a popular file hosting service based overseas.
“That is why cloud computing education is very important,” declared Chief Information Officers Forum (CIOF) Foundation Chairman George Kintanar, echoing IPC’s ‘cloudvocacy.’ As IPC President Rene Huergas noted, “We at IPC hope to be the catalyst of cloud computing in the enterprise market. Our goal is to accelerate that education, to equip the entrepreneur with all the tools of IT in the cloud, in order to make them compete more effectively, more so now that the ASEAN integration is imminent.”
