Cloudy with a Chance of… Something

I recently attended a “cloud” event and staffed our booth there.  I am not a big fan of booth duty, but it provided me the opportunity to talk with several people regarding their interpretations of the great and powerful Cloud. The event was somewhat sparsely attended and a majority of the discussion occurred between various exhibitors, but there was quite a bit of interest and among those who did attend.

In the end, the mystery and reverence surrounding the Cloud reminded me of those little three-eyed green aliens in the Toy Story movies:

Buzz: Who’s in charge here?

Aliens: [pointing up] The Claw!

Alien #1: The Claw is our master.

Ailen #2: The Claw chooses who will go and who will stay.

…

Aliens: Do not fight the Claw…

The Cloud is coming and we need to trust the Cloud: it will solve all of our problems, controls our destiny and we need it to survive.  At least there is no shortage of hype here. 

If the corridor of vendors at the event was any indication of the industry as a whole, there is no shortage of vendors selling Cloud.  Many of these companies seem to be simply repackaging old solutions in shiny new marketing slicks containing this latest technology buzzword.  In these cases, customers get the same thing they would have gotten two years ago, but with a new name. I guess that’s one take on green IT: recycled technology solutions!  An example here is some hosting companies retooling their offerings to use virtual machines rather than physical rack units as billing increments.  This is a good place to start, but is hardly the place they want to be.

On the other hand, some entirely new concepts are surfacing.  In this arena, I noticed companies that outsource instant messaging, online meetings, and even help desk solutions.  The business case here is pretty much the same as the one for non-cloud-based outsourcing: moving some IT support to a third party lets businesses reduce IT spend and internal time spent maintaining servers and applications.  I agree with the concept, but believe the pitfalls of that outsourcing model still apply.  From the most basic perspective, Who has access to my data? Where is it? Who do I call for support? Are they qualified?

There are still others who want you to send them all you’ve got and let their team of ‘experts’ handle everything.  I don’t know of anyone yet who is willing to bet their entire business on a startup cloud provider, but some smaller shops are probably considering it to save costs.  Datacenter facilities, infrastructure equipment, and IT ‘experts’ are not cheap.  Add to that the cost and potential complexity of maintaining reliable backups for compliance and DR purposes and pitching everything into the cloud sounds pretty slick.

Would you like fries with that?

A cloud solution is a combination of technologies and processes rather than an object that can be packaged up and handed over.  I can’t give someone a cloud like I can give them a hamburger, and they surely can’t buy one off the shelf.  There is quite a bit of unknown territory between current state and cloud state.  I recommend that anyone planning to run business applications in a public cloud should take a look at an internal cloud first.  Elasticity and utility pricing are two main principles of ‘the cloud,’ but these require certain levels of standardization, automation, and documentation to be truly effective.  Are you there yet?

Specific benefits and drawbacks depend on which cloud type is chosen – these types are frequently described with the acronym ‘XaaS’ where the ‘X’ is ‘A’ for Application, ‘P’ for Platform, ‘I’ for Infrastructure, and so on for whatever is being provided ‘as a service’ from the cloud.  Regardless of the type, consider your environment’s current state, operational practices, maturity and direction to determine whether a compelling need exists.  To continue the analogy, perhaps a burrito or chicken sandwich is more appropriate than a hamburger right now. 

You need a plan to ensure success.  I encourage a cautious approach that takes into account your environment as well as the state of the technology being considered.  To that end, I submit the following along with my apologies to David Letterman:

Top 10 Reasons You are NOT Ready for the Cloud

10. You do not have a reliable, redundant network (or Internet) connection.

If you use Google Apps or Salesforce.com, two popular Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings, and your office loses its connection to the Internet, how much work can your staff do?  What would happen if your email server, file server or databases were in the cloud as well?  100% uptime of the cloud-based service does not mean anything if your users can’t access those systems. 

Ensure that you are not architecting less reliability into your solution than you have today by adding a dependency on a component with less resiliency than the current implementation.

Different implementations of cloud-based services have different requirements, but all of them require connectivity between the service hosting the resources and the resource consumer.  Dial-up networking is probably not going to cut it, and some of those wireless AirCards aren’t much better.

9. You have specific compliance requirements and don’t want to go to jail.

Who is responsible for the security of your data when it lives in the cloud?  Do you, your auditors/regulators and the provider all see this the same way?  When backup tapes fall off the back of a truck, someone takes the heat, but getting data off of tapes requires some effort.  Data hosted by virtual machines in a cloud environment is much more easily accessible (I’m thinking “silver platter”).  That, and it could potentially be shipped across or even out of the country depending on your provider’s infrastructure.  Is that acceptable for the types of data you are storing or manipulating in the cloud? Are you sure?

8. Your current workloads aren’t smart enough to take full advantage of cloud infrastructure.

As the infrastructure becomes more advanced and flexible, applications designed to run on physical hardware are falling behind: they’re just not built to take advantage of the new levels of flexibility.  Can your Exchange server request the provisioning of an additional Client Access server when it realizes there is a bottleneck?  Can it even realize that there is such a bottleneck?

Existing workloads may be moved into a cloud infrastructure, but all of the nifty features may not be available unless the applications have been updated to support them.  It may make more sense to wait until your applications have been upgraded, or maybe now is the time to look at alternatives that have already been developed to run in a cloud.  Some of the SaaS solutions are maturing nicely – check out Google Apps Premier or Zimbra for email and collaboration.

Pages: 1 2 3