Pete Malcolm, CEO of Abiquo, delivered the keynote presentation at the third and final day of the Fifth International Cloud Expo, being held at the Javits Center in New York. He spoke about the difficulties faced by IT infrastructure managers as their organizations work toward virtualized resources and cloud computing architectures.

"For the IT infrastructure managers, it's all about containing risk," he noted. He outlined the challenges of provisioning virtual systems, whether IT managers "will get the standards they need, and whether they will interfere with what they have."

"These risks are real," he said. Many organizations and their IT management "are suffering from overwhelming growth (of virtualization) and are trying to keep their arms around disconnected applications. (And the truth is), many IT managers don't really have a handle on what's going on over on the application side."

"So we (vendors) need to help them reduce the load of deploying virtual machines and maintaining service levels...they have to be able to drop the management of disconnected machines and not be worried about what's happening in the virtual world."

When asked during a question and answer session how long this might take, he asked "well, how long is a piece of string?," meaning that each organization faces its own specific challenge and that vendors need to be aware of their customers' specific issues.

Cloud Expo's final day will also feature sessions devoted to SaaS, Cloud Management, Complexity, Standards, Encryption, and many other topics.

As delegates head home, they can contemplate two more Cloud Expo events coming this year: The Sixth International Cloud Expo in Prague June 21-22, and the Seventh International Cloud Expo in Santa Clara November 1-3.