Symantec ready to ride cloud evolution wave

"SOFTWARE-DEFINED" seems to be the latest prefix fad in the computing industry, but companies need to understand the complexities that accompany this next evolution of the data centre architecture, said Eric Hoh, vice-president, Asia South region for Symantec.

Speaking to BizIT in an interview, he said that the initial teething phase that companies around the world went through at the dawn of virtualisation technology is happening again with software-defined data centres.

Virtualisation was a technology concept that allowed IT administrators to stretch the utilisation of their server hardware, by duplicating or shutting down "virtual" servers. This allowed a myriad of modern functions such as testing projects safely on a virtual server, or quickly moving a company's users over to a mirror server in the event of the main server going down. It's a fundamental building block of cloud-computing technology, because it is a necessary ability element for servers to accommodate peaks in user needs, for instance.