NICTA set to tackle conservative Cloud adoption, collaboration

Conservative adoption of Cloud computing and a lack of interaction between the research and design (R&D) and commercial sectors are two big issues that National ICT Australia’s (NICTA) new Cloud business strategist, Bruce McCabe, is keen to tackle.

McCabe stepped into the role last week, with the former innovation officer for KPMG saying that a lack of local data centres in preventing mass Cloud computing adoption in Australia.

“We’ve been much more conservative with adopting Cloud in Australia than in the United States and there is a reason for that,” McCabe told Computerworld Australia.

“That is, most of the leading, mature and exciting Cloud providers are US based ... Australia has been cautious of using data centres located in another country.”

McCabe said Cloud outages like the one that affected VMWare last month, shake the confidence of the IT sector, causing fewer CIOs to adopt Cloud.

“All it has done is reinforce the existing concerns,” he said.

“These things make the problem space interesting because for a typical Australian CIO, Cloud is a world of risks but they could use Cloud to reduce risks.”

Having worked across both the research and commercial space, McCabe said bringing the two sectors closer together was an important task that NICTA hoped to be part of combating.

“The commercial sector is a world in which deadlines are shorter, timeframes are shorter for innovation and bringing things to the market,” he said.

“We’ve got an awful lot to learn. We have an academic and a commercial world, and I’d love to see them brought together.”

Collaboration was another area McCabe said he would try focusing on, with NICTA looking to join forces with banks and other commercial entities in the Cloud space.

“All of this depends on collaboration,” he said.

“I don’t want any R&D to happen without having it driven by the R&D people. We’re looking for those relationships.”

Follow Lisa Banks on Twitter: @CapricaStar

Follow Computerworld Australia on Twitter: @ComputerworldAu

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