V3 Cloud Summit: HP predicts over a fifth of firms will go totally cloud by 2012

Over 20 per cent of companies worldwide are likely to switch entirely to cloud computing by 2012, ditching all on-premise computing resources, HP's UK chief technology officer told attendees at the V3 Virtual Cloud Summit on Tuesday.

In a session entitled Public, private or hybrid: Which cloud is right for you?, Gurprit Singh argued that Gartner's recent prediction that 20 per cent of firms will not own any IT assets by next year falls short of the mark.

"If you're a small office/home office business, why would you actually have assets on your site which you have to manage and replace on a regular basis?" he asked.

Singh explained that, for most businesses, the right type of cloud is a blend of public and private.

"As organisations migrate from their existing traditional IT environments they will make use of services across those traditional environments but also private clouds, which can be off-promise and on-premise, and public clouds," he said.

"The key to success is seamless automation and management. It's where a lot of companies are putting effort and investment."

Singh added that the role of IT needs to change in order to reap the benefits of the cloud, from an organisation used to building out services on top of existing infrastructure to one which plays a broker role while "maintaining visibility and control".

Singh advised IT departments in large enterprises to ensure that any prospective cloud solutions are secure, compliant, open, modular, automated and resilient, and are backed up by proper service level agreements.

"Most organisations will have a mix when it comes to cloud solutions. They'll have some workloads running on a private cloud - on-premise or off-premise - and they'll consume some services off the public cloud and, of course, they'll have services running in a traditional datacentre," he said.

"In that kind of environment you want to manage that in a seamless way, and that is a key component in an enterprise-class cloud solution."

The V3 Virtual Cloud Summit is taking place all day on Tuesday 27 September, so if you haven't already, register here to attend the other sessions.