"This is the largest data center conference in Russia, and attracts a mix of internal data center facilities executives as well as hosting providers," Golden noted, adding by way of background that "Russia is coming out of a severe financial dislocation; its economy shrank 7.9 percent in 2009."
Things are looking up in Russia today - couldn't be much worse than 2009, for one thing, but as Golden says, "its penetration of IT use in the economy is far lower than what we see in the U.S. and western Europe."
This is both good and bad. A much lower percentage of companies in Russia have significant existing data center infrastructure, Golden said, so "for many companies, the choice of computing infrastructure presents an interesting greenfield opportunity."
But this is Russia, so there are complicating factors: Russia suffers the challenges of developing economies, Golden relates - "reliable electricity and Internet connectivity." For the locals, though, not the jet set: At the Radisson where Golden stayed, "the (free!) Wi-Fi delivers 13 Mbs down and 9 Mbs up, well beyond what I've ever gotten at any U.S. hotel, at any price."
But that's the Radisson, Russian enterprises don't have the resources to provide such service. And to compound the issue, the cost of building a data center has skyrocketed over the past few years, Golden says, "because the sophistication and density of computing infrastructures has increased significantly."
Relating the new developments in Russia's cloud computing industry to those of already-established cloud telephony, Golden predicts that, 'Russia, like other developing economies, may pursue cloud computing in much the same fashion as they have pursued telephony," where they essentially skip implementing permanent telephony and just plunge into mobile technology.
He sees two options for the Russian market:
Build an on-premise data center. This, he said, "provides less potential for service interruption due to connectivity problems, and, should power go out in some other location in the area, enable the entity to continue compute activities. It does, however, commit a company residing in a less-developed economy to an expensive capital investment and an ongoing capital expenditure regime, as equipment wears out or becomes obsolete and requires replacement."
Or simply use a hosting provider, which avoids making a commitment to building and maintaining a compute infrastructure, "while still allowing a company to have a state-of-the-art data center environment."
He concludes that the future of computing in Russia, as elsewhere, is "partitioned, cleanly-interfaced, highly scalable applications with security focused on an endpoint approach. Using an external cloud merely guides organizations toward those practices more quickly, paying further benefits in application extensibility and integration capability."