IDC:2016 China Cloud computing infrastructure market will exceed 1 billion dollars

BEIJING, May 29, 2012--IDC, a market research firm, has launched a "Guide to building Cloud infrastructure in China", based on a full survey of China's cloud computing market and the results of IDC's Global cloud computing experts. The project aims to provide advice to enterprises and organizations that build cloud computing infrastructure, so that end users can take fewer detours and deploy cloud platforms quickly and successfully.

Chinese users ' investment in building a cloud-computing infrastructure in 2011 has reached $286 million trillion, an increase of 42% per cent year-on-year, according to a recent study by IDC on China's cloud computing market. IDC expects China's cloud-computing infrastructure market to continue to grow at a high rate of over $1 billion trillion by 2016.

But a large number of Chinese users in the cloud computing infrastructure construction project implementation process, there is no clear construction ideas and guidelines, blindly follow the trend of the market, the results often fall into the technical misunderstanding, resulting in the project construction has not reached the initial expectations.

The "China Cloud Computing Infrastructure Construction Guide" designed a roadmap for Chinese users to implement cloud computing projects. IDC believes that for Chinese users, implementing the cloud infrastructure needs to follow the following process.

Key points in the roadmap that require user attention include:

First, in the cloud computing platform system design and architecture phase, users should focus on several factors: according to their own business characteristics and industry characteristics to select the system architecture, choose a fully scalable and high-performance hardware platform, from the technical and business two aspects to ensure the continuity of the cloud computing platform and the existing platform.

IDC notes that many of the well-known public cloud computing scenarios, such as Google and AWS, are cloud-based platforms based on distributed architectures. This is because the Internet industry has its own technical strength, it asset life cycle is short, the core business of real-time requirements are not high characteristics. IDC believes that distributed computing or other computing models are not absolutely superior, the Internet industry has chosen to adapt to their own distributed computing, while the other industry itself is not necessarily the same as the Internet, the user should consider their own industry characteristics to choose a truly suitable for their own cloud computing architecture.

"For the cloud computing platform for large enterprises, the choice of the overall architecture and hardware platform is closely related to the enterprise itself and the operating load on the platform, the system design should consider consistency and compatibility, if the system migration requirements for the existing application to rewrite, then risk assessment is indispensable." "said Liu Xutao, research manager at IDC's China Enterprise-level Systems Research department.

Second, the creation of an enterprise-class virtualization platform is an essential part of building a cloud computing infrastructure. But partitioning the physical servers into virtual machines is not a complete cloud computing implementation process.

In addition, after virtualization has redefined resources, further management of these virtual resources is needed to dynamically control these resources for application services. This is also an essential feature of cloud computing.

IDC found that some users have realized the virtualization of some of their infrastructure hardware resources, and they are faced with a larger range of servers, storage, network resources and a higher level of virtualization platform management, to create a resource pool. This requires the virtualization layer above the implementation of template management, dynamic, load management, life cycle management functions. "Users need a short implementation cycle, the use of low threshold of the entry-level cloud platform to quickly meet its virtualization, resource pool creation management, automated management of the urgent needs, and then realize a smooth upgrade of the ' senior cloud set ' to meet their personalized needs. "Peng, a senior analyst at IDC's China Enterprise Systems Research Department, said.

Finally, the application of porting, development and deployment is also an important part of completing the cloud computing platform.

In this regard, IDC China Enterprise-level Systems Research senior analyst Zhang, said: "Cloud computing platform is dedicated to the virtual desktop, such as the construction of new applications is not accurate." In most cases, the user is porting the traditional business and the existing application to the cloud computing platform, the implementation of cloud computing does not necessarily create many new applications for the enterprise, the user is more concerned with ensuring the continuity of existing business and application. ”

IDC research shows that the first to be accepted by users, but also the most popular cloud applications are "business class" applications, such as ERP, database and so on. Most of these applications are closely related to business logic and resource-intensive applications. In order to achieve the goal of "smooth migration" for enterprise business applications, it is particularly important to choose the right platform and provide a cloud-based infrastructure that provides two development APIs for the business.

In response to the cloud computing phenomenon of some companies, the China Cloud Computing infrastructure Construction Guide points out that the implementation of cloud computing is not a simple software and hardware integration project, but a change in enterprise IT strategy. Enterprise users should focus on a series of related measures, including business and organizational structure and other aspects, the need to upgrade cloud computing to the level of corporate strategy to co-ordinate. IDC advises enterprise users to evaluate the cloud project carefully before implementing it, and to collaborate with experienced IT consulting service providers to plan the cloud computing project as a whole, taking into account the management model of the cloud computing center and incorporating future operations into the overall planning. IDC's survey of enterprise users shows that among the various users of cloud computing infrastructure, public cloud service providers are more concerned with how to form new, sustainable and profitable business models through cloud computing, supporting and facilitating business development; Private cloud users are more concerned with how to improve the efficiency of IT systems and optimize it architectures through cloud computing, Realize the transformation of the IT department's service mode, and turn it into the Business Support Center from the cost center of the enterprise.

"Before considering how to build the cloud computing infrastructure, enterprise users should first make clear the purpose of building cloud computing and avoid cloud computing for cloud computing," said 周震刚, senior research manager at IDC's China Enterprise Systems Research Department. ”

To sum up, IDC believes that in the practice of cloud computing should pay attention to the following principles:

First, the cloud computing to the enterprise strategic level to co-ordinate, from the business Innovation and IT service transformation of the height of planning and deployment;

Second, fully consider the business and industry characteristics as well as the existing platform conditions, fully assess the feasibility of system migration, to ensure the infrastructure platform for technical continuity and core business continuity;

Third, virtualization is the basis of cloud computing, but not all of cloud computing, the construction of heterogeneous platform to meet the business RAS requirements of the enterprise-class virtualization platform is the only way to build cloud computing;

Open is the basic feature of cloud computing, cloud computing platform should be able to provide a standard API and good compatibility with existing applications, enterprises should be careful to choose cloud computing service Provider, priority is dedicated to building open ecosystem partners.

(Responsible editor: Lu Guang)