What the masses are missing about the Cloud – Part 2
popping..In part 1 of this four part series I highlighted the top 4 negative comments that I commonly hear about the cloud:
- The cloud is insecure
- Cloud computing is immature
- Cloud is nothing new. We have been doing this for years.
- Cloud computing is not really cheaper
I addressed security in part 1. In this post I’ll discuss maturity.
Speaking of technology that is not mature, I am writing this post at 30,000 feet as I fly home from Boston. Sure WiFi, especially WiFi from planes is far from perfect and mature, but we still all use it. The “cloud is immature” statement is the same excuse we heard when PCs first came out and when the Internet starting becoming a viable option for businesses.
So we have a camp that says “the cloud is nothing new” and another camp that says it is immature. Which is it? In my opinion, it is somewhere in between. Yes, the concepts of external hosting has been around for a while, but is that really the same thing as cloud computing? Could you get a virtual server with tons of CPU and memory for 80 cents an hour 10 years ago? Didn’t think so. Today’s version of cloud computing is so much further advanced than yesterday’s hosting model. So much more of the infrastructure and administration duties have been abstracted. The price point has made it feasible and reasonable for companies like mine to never have to buy servers again. The auto-scaling capabilities allow companies to react to spikes in traffic (both up and down) proactively without needing to procure additional resources.
Are there a lot more technological advancements required before there will be mass adoption of the cloud. You bet? There is a lot of room for improvement in areas like standards, security, and even performance. But like any other technology, it is the job of the buyer (or leaser) to understand the risks and to mitigate them. Architecting for the cloud today requires that one understands the strengths and the limitations of the cloud. There is no magic here. It all boils down to architecture. Wherever there are gaps it is up to the architects to address them. For example, if your business requirements call for PCI compliance don’t expect the cloud to provide that for you out of the box. You have to design for that (I have discussed a few options in the past).
I just attended the New England Venture Summit where several startups pitched their business models to a dozen or so venture capitalists. You can’t tell any of those entrepreneurs that the cloud is too immature to build a company on. In the technology category, every company was leveraging the cloud. All of us have some form of SaaS solution and most of us are delivering that SaaS solution on top of Amazon (IaaS), Google (PaaS), or some other cloud vendor. All of these companies are deploying quickly and burning very little capital in the process. These companies are not just building pretty websites. I saw examples of serious data mining applications, high speed transaction processing, testing as a service, and others.
My thoughts
As with any technology that is in the hype phase, there is a lot of resistance to change. The companies who architect their enterprise correctly for the cloud have an opportunity to reap the following benefits:
- Substantial reduction of Capex
- Speed to market
- Better disaster recovery & business continuity
- Ability to forecast IT costs
- Better scalability
So maybe the cloud is not as mature as some would like, but can we really afford to continue spending investor dollars for physical servers that are usually not optimally utilized? Can we continue to slow down the business with long procurement cycles? Can we continue to not have a robust disaster recovery plan because the CFO refuses to write that huge check?
For those companies concerned with the maturity of the cloud, why not test the waters with something that is not mission critical? Here are some good non-mission critical use cases:
- R&D or proof of concept work – Why purchase hardware for a new initiative before you prove out your design? Use the cloud to stress test your app. Use the different size servers available to you. Find the bottlenecks. All this can be done for just a few bucks. Tear it down when you are done.
- Adhoc analysis – Do you have a lot of data to crunch through? Fire up some servers and do the processing in the cloud. Get your answers and tear down the environment when you are done.
- Data Backups - Take some non-critical data and replicate it in the cloud. Say goodbye to tape drives and the companies that ship this data to hardened locations.
The reason why I encourage those who are pessimistic about the cloud to try one of these low risk scenarios is once they see how easy it is, how productive they can be, and how inexpensive the project will be, then maybe they will see the value and investigate further. A lot of people just say no to the cloud without ever kicking the tires on it. When somebody who works at a place where it takes several weeks or months to procure a server right clicks on an virtual image, tells the system to fire up five new servers, and the servers are ready in five minutes (including database and application servers), they just may change their view on the cloud. I’m just saying!
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Comments
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You are correct sir. If I were to construct a company today it would live in the Cloud. The insecurities are driven by regulatory concerns and big iron inertia. As a validation & virtualization practice we are answering these issues and finding companies taking baby steps.
Even if the concerns don’t make sense, for major companies you have very specific oversight panels that dictate where the applications and data need to be housed.
Yes a well-architected app in the cloud can be very secure, robust, available… guys like you go prove it, and the big players and SIs will need to “certify” it in their own context and it will happen. 2 years is my mainstream estimate, outside of specific shared business functions that can easily move to Cloud without regulatory issues. More power to ya!
- Jason English (http://blog.itko.com)