While many small to mid-sized firms are starting to adopt cloud-based services, most larger enterprises are still holding back, and evaluating how these services can best augment those delivered currently by internal IT departments.

Computing talked to systems management specialist BMC’s chief technology officer Kia Behnia about how chief information officers (CIOs) should be dealing with cloud services.

What’s the biggest problem CIOs come to you with?

Over the past two or three years we’ve engaged with a number of enterprises and service providers around virtualisation initiatives, and many of them have embarked on a journey to migrate their physical resources to virtualised ones as much as they can. They do this for a number of reasons – to reduce their capital expenses, their power, cooling and facilities charges.

Over the past year and a half a lot of new innovative services have popped up under the auspices of cloud computing. Amazon is probably the current leader in providing an alternative delivery model for computing resources.

Many of the enterprises mentioned above started to evaluate Amazon as an alternative delivery model for certain workloads. However, there are some challenges with this model - such as enterprise needs for security, service-level agreements (SLAs), and quality of service, which prevent them from considering these public cloud services for all purposes.

The pain point they have evaluating these services was a set of issues around compliance, security, and licence costs - making sure that deploying commercial software in a public setting wouldn’t violate any of their licence agreements.

Another problem was provisioning and de-provisioning these resources from a well-understood standardised process, rather than chaotically.

They came to us and said – our lines of business have started up these accounts and we fear for the security of these services, particularly around intellectual property. They said: "We’ve put a temporary hold on these business units deploying these services, but what we’d like to do is to centralise, regulate it and put in a process around it. We can then offer it to our internal constituents for a specific set of services. We’re basically augmenting our services with what Amazon provides."

Where do think cloud computing is today?

I think a lot of people have been hyping up the technology as the answer to all their problems, and that’s simply not the case, because we’re simply not at that level of maturity.

Today many enterprises can use these public clouds to offload some of their less mission-critical or customer-sensitive workloads, such as test and development systems.

But I think the bigger opportunity for large organisations is to take what the public cloud vendors are offering, such as self-service portals, automated workloads for provisioning services, costing and metering, and bring that to the enterprise – what people call private clouds.

We see a great deal of interest around establishing these private clouds within the enterprise and borrowing some of the best practices and user experiences that the public cloud vendors have provided and innovated on.

In the short term public cloud workloads will be limited, but adding security and better SLAs will make enterprises more comfortable about deploying them. The short-term outlook for private clouds is better and I think larger enterprises will be looking to offer them to their users.

Should there be a standard for cloud computing?

I think it will evolve and there’ll be more standards, but interoperability will be the key. I think many vendors recognise that if interoperability isn’t there, the market won’t increase, because customers will keep their workloads where they are now.

I think it’s comparable to how the internet evolved, where in the beginning you had to look at what browser you were using and what version your web server was. Pretty quickly people started focusing on protocols and standard formats, and that’s how it evolved. Given the fact that cloud computing is still relatively new, we have a long way to go.

Is interoperability a major sticking point?

Absolutely – we’re already seeing that the heterogeneity that existed in the datacentre with different operating systems and hardware platforms, takes on a whole new meaning, when you’re dealing with third-party providers. Different sets of application programming interfaces, lack of standards today and different service levels are all part of the problem.

As a management vendor, one of the things that we’ve done over the past 28 years is develop software that manages disparate and heterogeneous environments, whether it runs a distributed system, mainframe, or a virtual system – or now in a cloud environment.

One of the advantages to managing hardware and services like this is that it avoids lock-in. An important point that many clients feel about cloud computing is around the lock-in aspect. They go with a stack vendor and build their applications on that, and they feel their management and everything is tied to that sole provider. So if anything better comes along, they feel they are not going to be able to take advantage of that.

This looks like a good thing for BMC – is it?

We believe the world will continue to be heterogeneous and CIOs and enterprises want a trusted vendor that will innovate and manage whatever the best technology there is out there, and also be able to manage it back into their internal IT processes. Rather that, than vendors who offer a one-size-fits-all solution around a combination of hardware, software and cloud services. This is very much a strategy that locks in the customer for many years and does not provide choice.

Do you think a major uptake of cloud computing services would choke the internet?

Consumer traffic such as video downloads is much more dispersed throughout the day. Enterprise traffic patterns are very different than those of the consumer, because enterprises have seasonal requirements such end-of-quarter financials to deal with and seasonal sales. If cloud computing becomes more mainstream however, expect business traffic to really outgrow consumer traffic.

Remember, many of these companies invest billions of dollars on corporate networks and their own corporate computing infrastructure. I think it will definitely have an effect on the network infrastructure, because different workloads from enterprises and consumers are being run at different times. There will be plenty of business for the telecoms companies – the network pipes will have to grow no matter what.