HP says the snooping revelations from Edward Snowden was a drag on cloud computing growth as buyers outside the US have thought twice about opting for public cloud.
Speaking on Gigaom Structure conference in San Francisco HP Enterprise Group executive VP and GM of the Bill Veghte, companies outside US are worried about buying US tech products.
Veghte said: "It’s just a bummer. Never in the history of humanity have you seen that rate of infrastructure buildout, and yet … that’s a discussion people want to have."
He added that it emerges as an issue that needs to be worked through when talking to customers, reported Computerworld. The customers, especially Chinese customers are now worried about the security of public-cloud data.
Veghte said previously there was "a level of naivete" among cloud users about data location and privacy concerns about their data but now it has changed following the Snowden revelations.
"They’re a lot more thoughtful around how and where they put stuff outside the firewall," he said.
Though Veghte has faith in long term prospects of cloud computing, he said currently the percentage of enterprise apps or data in the cloud is "in the low single digits" which will only grow up.
Concern about the public cloud has now prompted the company to focus on hybrid clouds which allows enterprise enhanced control over their data.
Similar sentiment was also expressed by VMware’s SVP of hybrid cloud services Bill Fathers who said that the NSA revelations are one of the biggest concerns of the clients.
He is however more optimistic about the growth prospects saying that the concerns about data security will expand the adoption of public cloud not slow down.
Fathers added that the revelations initially attracted knee-jerk reaction sparking fears of death of public cloud adoption but later enterprises are now recognising that public clouds can actually deliver better security compared to private clouds while offering better economics.
"Clouds are already starting to get big enough that they’re being run with far better security and performance than even the richest companies in the world can dream of running in private clouds," Fathers added.
