Software as a service is "several years away" from being enterprise-ready, but companies should begin experimenting with the technology, according to a Citrix executive.
Martin Duursma, chair of the Citrix CTO office and vice president of advanced products, said it is "early days" for cloud computing. "We are on the steepest portion of the hype-cycle curve," he said, advising against fully handing over an enterprise to the cloud just yet.
He raised the example of online photo-sharing site, SmugMug, which relies on Amazon's utility web storage service. When Amazon's cloud went down earlier this year, many sites hosted on it were also crippled.
In SmugMug's case, the photos it stored on Amazon's servers were at the core of its business. "Companies should not place mission-critical aspects of their business on the cloud," said Duursma, speaking at the IDC CIO Summit 2008 held in Singapore on Tuesday.
However, he noted that software as a service (SaaS) has much potential and said companies should adapt to exploit this potential once the cloud-computing industry reaches maturity.
"Eventually, it will not make sense for companies to be their own services and datacentre experts", where they can benefit from the economies of scale that larger cloud vendors can provide, he added.
Companies that need quick "boosts" to functions such as storage or computing power, can also rely on the cloud. Comparatively, the traditional processes of procuring hardware and expanding a datacentre are far slower, said Duursma.
During an earlier session, Patrick Chan, IDC Asia-Pacific's chief technology adviser of its emerging technology council, said: "Chief information officers today must understand the implications of emerging technologies so as to leverage them for the blueprint of improving tomorrow's business."
"The pace of execution for both business and IT has accelerated at an amazing rate and chief information officers with their enterprises must keep up," said Chan.
According to IDC, companies in the Asia-Pacific region are expected to spend $154bn (£87bn) on IT this year. Emerging technology, such as cloud computing, may emerge as a tool to help combat growing expenses, said Duursma.
