Cloud computing ‘more solid’ than non-cloud environment

CEBU CITY -- A serial entrepreneur from Silicon Valley, who is also a proud Filipino, allayed fears on Thursday that cloud computing threatens corporate security, saying it’s more solid than non-cloud environment.

Cloud computing is currently considered as one of the most significant shifts in information technology, promising cost-efficient applications and data that the public can use from the Internet like Facebook and Twitter.

Winston Damarillo, CEO and co-founder of Morphlabs, a company built in Cebu, said “it’s no less secured than the servers you store in your closet.”

“It’s not a threat to security. People are just scared because it's got the ability to massively fail. If you have one server that breaks, nobody notices it. But if you have an entire cloud computing environment, which breaks, like Amazon, then it affects a lot of people. So people worry about that, but on the average, if you look at what they call service level agreement, cloud computing is more solid than non-cloud environment,” he told Sun.Star.

He said with cloud computing, people will only pay for what they need.

“Cloud computing is like power, you have a 220 volts plug, and you only pay for what your appliance use…It saves a lot of money, in terms of power, and it reduces the number of computers you'll gonna need…It makes the application easy to use,” he said.

Damarillo believes that cloud computing will soon become the most prevalent infrastructure. “We’ll soon forget that there are servers at all. We’ll expect applications to be downloadable from the Internet and you just log on and use it.”

With this, Damarillo stressed that the Philippines must embrace cloud computing.

“Cloud is like a national infrastructure, we have to have it. Cebuanos have access to it now,” he said, adding that “if you run cloud from the Philippines, your data stay in the Philippines…it’s faster, no latency.”

Damarillo is in Cebu for the “Hack2Hatch: From Hacker to Founder” weekend entrepreneurship camp that aims to gather local tech developers. It is part of the “Silicon Valley Comes to the Philippines,” a special four-day mentorship toward collective empowerment and economic development, a press statement said.

The activity is scheduled on October 5 to 7 in Cebu City.

Aside from Damarillo, top Filipino American technopreneurs, including Philippine Development Foundation chairman of the board and Tallwood managing partner Dado Banatao and Sheila Lirio-Marcelo, founder and CEO of Care.com, will be the mentors. (Jean Mondoñedo/Sunnex)