Cloud Computing Will be a Trend in Indonesia in 2012?

In the last couple months, we have detected several movements of cloud computing services in Indonesia. The first one is Joyent Cloud, in partnership with Malaysia-based Anise Asia. Joyent Cloud and Anise Asia brought a seminar couple weeks ago and tried to deliver information about cloud computing advantages and is myths. Joyent Cloud is one of the pioneer in cloud computing and now their services is utilized by several big startups, including LinkedIn.

The next one is Amazon Web Services, which was giving their support for e27 and StartLokal's meetup few days ago. And the latest is CBN that developing cloud computing data center assisted by Brocade switching technology. For local ecosystem, you definitely still remember about Biznet and its cloud computing pioneer.

This is definitely a technology phenomena. Previously, big companies are in a race to build their own data centers and try to run it by themselves -- in hoping to save the cost. With the fast track of technology, annual updates of hardware and software is definitely not feasible and even may result in higher cost. Then new question comes, by using cloud computing services, will the maintenance sector be even easier or in opposite -- getting more complex?

Budget and reliability are the usual issues when one company is offered to migrate to cloud computing service. What about the cost, is it getting cheaper or getting more expensive? Moreover what about the reliability? One occasion that haunted everyone is when Amazon Web Services was crashed and stopped the Foursquare, Reddit or Quora services. What's the service level guarantee that cloud computing service will never be crashed or blocking the productivity?

Francis Lee, CTO APAC at Joyent, told us that the cost of using cloud computing services isn't cheaper compared to making your own. But you have to remember that by creating your own data center you have to set budget for capital expenditure — buildings, infrastructures, hardware; all of them are having deprecation and maintenance cost. By using cloud computing, all you need to think about is operational expenditure periodically without all dizziness on how to upgrade the computational performance for following year.

What about reliability? It's a tricky situation and will determine the advantages of each cloud computing services. These services are using different fully-customized technology. One or some of them are treating data center as a sort of entity that can be managed using special operating system. The tip is related on performance quality being delivered and what's the backup plan to minimize the crash possibility.

Other than that, companies need to understand that giving away all the system to cloud computing services doesn't mean you can stop sweating and doesn't care on how using it. A good cloud computing services will ask the client to collaborate on building the architecture of their computation to guarantee the security and system optimization. Learning on new stuffs (about cloud computing technology) is a must.

Back to our main question, will cloud computing be a trend in Indonesia in 2012? Personally I would say it won't happen in 2012. Next year will be an education phase where there will be more companies try to acknowledge this technology and its pros-cons. They are going to give more trials -- in order to find out whether cloud services is much better than maintaining their own data centers.

One or two successful case studies of big companies migrating to cloud services are needed to boost the acceleration on cloud computing adaptation in Indonesia. I am estimating the cloud computing will finally taste the juice in 2013, or 2014 at the least. These one-two year ahead will be a critical phase for cloud computing services to prove that they are deserved to get better attention from local technology communities.