Q&A: Carter George executive director of Dell storage

Tell us about the importance of cloud storage in the enterprise. Do businesses trust it enough to store mission critical apps?

People already have confidence in the cloud. Colder data, such as backups, are already stored there by many businesses.

Applications have also been moved to the cloud, most notably within HR departments. Payroll systems have been in the cloud for years, even though it hasn't necessarily been called "the cloud".

Companies don't differentiate themselves from competitors because they do their payroll better. Even though it is an important application, it is something that companies have been willing to outsource.

So, in the next three to five years, will we see more mission critical apps move to the cloud?

As consumers and businesses continue to have positive experiences with the cloud it will be used more. The larger corporations will use private clouds as they are able to build and maintain the infrastructure themselves. Smaller customers are likely to use public clouds.

Virtualisation is also going to accelerate cloud usage. Having a virtualised workload makes it much easier to move data within or between infrastructures.

Businesses are very interested to know about the cost savings that are possible and many are likely to deploy hybrid configurations.

The first wave of cloud has really been developed for the consumer, but business clouds are now being deployed. We offer the vCloud and several others are set to come out this year.

We [want] to provide users with tools so they can build their own cloud and connect it seamlessly with existing infrastructure.