On Wednesday 16th June last, I attended a Best Connected event organised by Enterprise Ireland on the topic of “Managed Services & Solutions – partnerships in the Cloud”. The objective of Best Connected is to link Ireland’s innovators with the World by facilitating contacts between indigenious business, multinationals, third level institutions and the public sector and ultimately creating export lead employment.

The seminar featured a number of presenters who spoke about the characteristics of cloud based services and the potential opportunities for service providers. Some of the key messages that I took away from the seminar included;

• Cloud computing is an evolving paradigm which provides on-demand services that can help companies reduce costs and facilitating the speedy delivery of new technology
• As cloud computing is still evolving, companies are using and/or assessing computing services with due consideration for risk management and operational stability
• Cloud service providers can use certifications such as ISO 27001 or ITIL to differentiate themselves in the market
• There are opportunities for new products or services to be delivered in the areas of software to manage:
  • computing tasks across multiple infrastructure service platforms to facilitate scaling, availability and deployment tasks
  • storage of data across multiple cloud platforms
  • integration between different cloud services on different platforms
• There was a consenus that cloud computing is being hyped and that one of the challenges is to continue to demonstrate the practical business benefits that it can enable

The presentations, the panel Q&A and the networking before and after the event ensured a good discussion was had in relation to the future potential of managed cloud services. Further details and links to the presentation are available at Bestconnected.ie