At a roundtable event in Sydney today hosted by four technology vendors - Eaton Corporation. Kroll Ontrack, WatchGuard and Tecala - warned that without proper technology plumbing companies could be achieving short-term financial benefits, while putting themselves at risk in the future.

According to Rodney Gedda, a senior analyst with Telsyte, Australian enterprises are enthusiastic adopters of both virtualisation and cloud computing. He said that 56 per cent of organisations had begun virtualising their servers, while 19 per cent of companies were now committed to, or were building private clouds.

Pieter de Gunst, director of sales for consultant and solutions provider Tecala, however cautioned against that being seen as a natural precursor to a transition to public cloud systems. 'Private cloud as a journey to public cloud is a nonsense'¦most are doing it because they don't want to go public,' he said.

Mr Gedda identified NAB, ACMA, the Australian Bureau of Statistics and Commonwealth Bank as being among those local organisations currently developing private clouds. 'A lot of organisations will have private clouds forever, rather than transition to public alternatives, according to Mr de Gunst.

This was especially the case for those able to demonstrate that internal cloud style services are at least as cost efficient as publicly available services. He said he was currently working with a subsidiary of an international organisation that was delivering in house computing services that had been shown to be 30-40 per cent cheaper than equivalent services available from a public cloud provider.

Organisations which started to virtualise or cloudify their computing however needed to ensure that they had planned for issues such as proper security, effective power supply able to cope with the rapid ramp up that virtualisation and cloud allows, and also were properly managing issues such as back up and disaster recovery.

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According to Richard Jenman, ANZ managing director of power management company, Eaton; 'Power is fundamental to any network and can be one of the most significant 'gotchas'.'

Where there were accepted formulae for calculating the power supplies needed for physical servers, organisations often failed to properly consider the power they would need to run a largely virtualised environment.

'In a virtual environment it becomes very dynamic'¦you need to watch the flow and migration of data,' he said. According to Mr Jensen; 'There is a gap between power provision on the network and the move to virtualisation.

'The only belt and braces way'¦is for power management software to be part of the virtualisation hypervisor,' he added.

Kroll Ontrack which provides data recovery services believes that more attention also needed to be paid to data protection, back up and disaster recovery plans in virtualised or cloud environments, especially to protect organisations from attacks from 'the enemy within'.  According to Adrian Briscoe, regional general manager, the company had recently been called to deal with a customer in Asia who had an IT staff member who had deliberately not performed regular back-ups on virtual machines, and then dialed in from outside and deleted 28 virtual machines, leaving the company in strife.

All the vendors stressed that while senior management were often attracted to the notion of virtualisation and cloud because of the perception that they could save money, there needed to be proper attention paid to the IT practices surrounding virtual environments and clouds or organisations could be placing themselves and their information assets at risk.