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VietNamNet Bridge – Some ministries, branches and local authorities tend to
apply cloud computing in order to cut down the investment costs, minimize risks
and optimize the efficiency. However, they have also been warned about the high
risks.
The pioneers
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Nguyen Huu Chinh, Director of the MONRE’s Information Technology (IT) Department, said that after the first period of “virtualizing” the IT infrastructure, the ministry has successfully cut down 20 percent of the investment costs. When necessary, the ministry can use necessary resources got from the “clouds”, and after use, it gives them back to the “clouds” of others’ use, which allows using resources in the most economical way.
With the initial results, MONRE proves to be relatively self-confident in the feasibility of the strategy on using cloud computing for IT applications in the branch. Besides the use of cloud computing, the ministry is also trying to standardize database, and build up the procedures, standards and necessary policies so as to apply cloud computing in providing public services as well as providing statistics to the society.
The Ministry of Education and Training (MOET) has also been applauding the application of cloud computing. MOET”s IT Agency Director Quach Tuan Ngoc said that cloud computing is really suitable to the education sector.
Currently, according to Ngoc, every school or training establishment now “takes on” a server, which forces them to spend money and time to “bring up”, manage and develop the servers. Meanwhile, in many cases, ministries and agencies do not use up all the functions of the infrastructure systems, which is really a great waste of resources.
If using cloud computing, state agencies can use resources in accordance with their demands, while resources can be allocated to the right persons who really have demand.
The fact that every school has to build up a website of its own, lease a server and purchase the domain name has caused a big waste to the state budget. However, the situation will be improved when the IT Agency, in a document released recently, has instructed local education and training departments to shift to use cloud computing.
The Achilles’ heel
It is clear that cloud computing is far from a perfect technology. IBM has warned about the risks that agencies, organizations and enterprises may face when shifting to use cloud computing, if they do not follow comprehensive strategies.
The troubles relating to the servers may interrupt the connection or lead to the loss of important information, such as email contents or financial transactions. The bankruptcy or the stop of giving support to users will interrupt the procedures of the institutions. If this is an accountancy application, this may cause the interruption in making invoices, or managing merchandise.
Besides, the delay caused by the bad quality of the information storage service on clouds may make it difficult for people to access websites, thus slowing down the business speed of enterprises.
Ensuring information security has emerged as the biggest worry for cloud service users. Therefore, a lot of ministries and branches still keep the “wait-and-see” attitude: they wait to see if others meet any troubles in applying cloud computing and they will only apply the new technology after they can draw lessons from the experiences of others.
A businessman said that he finds it difficult to preserve the assets that are kept at home, let alone the assets kept on the “clouds”
From January 2010 to April 5, 2011, 130 cases of doing harm on cloud computing were reported. 43 percent of cloud computing users have reported security troubles in the last 12 months. 49 percent of threats were announced in 2010, while solutions have not found for 44 percent of the threats.
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