Cost cutting from the cloud

Géza Ragoncsa, T-Systems Hungary Plc.’s. Chief Officer responsible for info-communication solutions, gave us an interview on the reliability and popularity of cloud services and the most important features of the company‘s solutions.

What is your experience with the current status of corporate cloud services in Hungary in comparison to neighboring countries?

Unfortunately I have to tell that we lag behind: based on Gartner’s Y2014 IT Service Line and Cloud Forecast database we prepared a report showing that Hungarian clients spend only 1.3% of their total IT service and software expenditures on public cloud services. The same indicator is 3.9% in Eastern Europe.
As the total IT outsourcing market is stronger in Hungary than in the regional countries the low Hungarian figure must be attributable to the lack of trust towards cloud services.

What is the root cause of this distrust?

Unfortunately it is hard to address ungrounded concerns, however, now we can see the light at the end of the tunnel. Last year we made a survey with the involvement of almost 400 companies and when we asked them to point out the biggest advantage of cloud services 45% of the respondents said that it was higher reliability and availability. Lower investment costs were only placed second among upside factors. Although many companies are still concerned about the security risks of cloud solutions as the number of users increases there are less and less skeptical voices.

Once we talk about cost-cutting: what is the order of magnitude of potential cost reduction in the case of medium or big enterprises?

It is hard to tell concrete figures as all companies are different. However, we can say that significant savings can be achieved at companies where IT plays an important role, e.g. in the field of hardware, data center infrastructure and human resources too. Let us not forget that cloud services can be used without investment.

How can you convince potential medium and big enterprise clients to use your solutions?

Drawing on its extensive portfolio, T-Systems Hungary offers a comprehensive scope of services to such companies, including underlying infrastructure services, communication and collaboration solutions, different horizontal, industrial and business applications. We cooperate with the largest international manufacturers to thus provide state-of-the-art cloud solutions to our partners. This makes our clients’ life easier because this way they only have to contract with a single supplier with which they can agree on the necessary level of expert support and uniform billing. The quality of our work is supported by our long term experience.

How much does it cost to update T-Systems Hungary’s cloud solutions?

Nothing. The most sophisticated solutions can be provided to our customers without any need for investment on their behalf, always customized to their specific demand and in flexible schemes, which guarantees growing medium enterprises to use an ICT background and always up-to-date infrastructure not unlike those used by large enterprises, pointed out Géza Ragoncsa.

Would you please elaborate the issue of security in more details?

I think it is an important telltale sign that our solutions’ firm basis is the T-Systems Cloud & Data Center which is not only the biggest but also the most secure data center in Central-Eastern Europe. This has a particular importance in the case of cloud services because due to the high availability of the service we can ensure the required level of operation for business critical applications. Another aspect of security is data security and in this respect we provide higher quality services than the solutions currently used by our potential customers. Those who need an even higher level of security we recommend our instantSecurity service, providing defense solutions from the cloud, like firewall, virus protection or filtering harmful content from the company's data traffic.

Source: Figyelő