The pIT stop Q&A: Is cloud computing ready for prime time?

The pIT stop panel answer your questions

John Best asks the pIT stop panel:

Does the panel believe that “cloud computing” is ready for prime time? Amazon and Google both offer frameworks allowing companies to provision and manage web site/service resource on demand. Would the panel build solutions using these resources, even trusting mission-critical applications to them?

The pIT stop panel's replies:

There are certainly a number of organisations that use cloud computing facilities, like those provide by Amazon, Google and many others, as an integral part of their corporate architecture. The main use cases are where there is a need to provision additional capacity, in response to peaks of demand – either predicted or unpredicted. In the majority of cases this architecture has worked well for the companies concerned, although - like all IT - there have been issues and outages.

The real question for me is: “How mission critical is ‘mission critical’?” I would definitely not use any of the commercial public clouds for an application whose status was a matter of life and death, such as an ambulance or police command and control system. I would also not recommend using public cloud infrastructure for applications such as customer provisioning where even a short outage can have major revenue implications. However, there are many cases where cloud is appropriate. Simply put, not all applications need a 100 per cent uptime service level agreement (SLA) guarantee. Cloud is simply another service delivery option and matching the business requirement for availability to the availability of the technical delivery platform is, and always has been, a key responsibility of the CIO. Before CIOs sign up to using the public cloud they really need to understand both the practical and commercial/contractual uptime of the service.

Private clouds are a different matter, even though some would call the term an oxymoron. These services inherently have a greater ability to offer service levels and to be an integral part of the corporate architecture. The availability of private cloud infrastructure to be flexed, to give the highest level of SLA guarantees, is more feasible than it is for the public cloud offerings.

Basic advice – cloud can be an integral part of any application, it’s just that the service levels of the infrastructure need to be match to the business requirements. Just the same as with any technical solution.

By David Mitchell, senior vice president of IT research, Ovum

First there is the issue of legacy applications. These applications do not disappear quickly, and migrating them to a cloud environment will not happen overnight. There are many applications deployed today that will simply not be able to be redeployed using a cloud environment. Even if extensive work were done on re-engineering these applications (a considerable investment in the first place), factors such as data sharing among a wide user base, remote storage, and so on, are enormously complex and could prove to be barriers to deployment in a cloud environment.

Legal barriers are also considerable. Data retention, legal discovery proceedings as well as other requirements all require proper handling from a process and requirements perspective. For example, how does your cloud provider provide the data required if all they are doing is housing it? Retaining all data becomes cumbersome very quickly. And if too little data is retained, this causes its own issues. In the global economy, where large enterprises operate in many countries, they are required to comply with regulations that exact different requirements compared to other jurisdictions.

That said, cloud services will be adopted by many businesses, and where such issues do not apply, and opportunistic use of these services is certainly viable (given the usual diligence of discovery and benefit analysis). Hardware technologies such as Intel Virtualisation Technology in both processor and I/O hardware (including the network stack), combined with software offerings from leading providers means that the datacentres that will power these usage models are becoming increasingly suited to handling an increased variety of increasingly complex workload requirements.

So again, it comes down to whether the external cloud computing can provide the right solution to the business problem. Is it ready for primetime? That is difficult to say. What is certain is that technology is developing that ought to start overcoming these barriers.

By Intel

Cloud computing is certainly the buzzword du jour for many in the IT industry, and it’s an important step on the path to what has been called “utility computing” – the idea that IT can be sourced like electricity or telephony, through a plug in the wall and paid for on an as-needed basis.

Services such as those from Amazon and Google certainly conform to that roadmap. They are proper, industrial-strength products that are being used by serious businesses for real-life applications. But to describe them as “prime time” – meaning ready to be assessed alongside conventional options such as buying software applications and running them on a server in-house – well, perhaps it is a little early in their adoption cycle. There are still a lot of issues to be addressed.

Some “cloud” applications are certainly in the mainstream – Salesforce.com for CRM, Netsuite for accounting, Google Apps for office tools, for example – all of which are supporting sizeable organisations for specific functions already.

If you’re a small business, something like Netsuite combined with Google Apps would probably support most of your basic IT needs – and therefore you would consider them mission critical to such an organisation. Initially at least, it’s those smaller businesses that are likely to be most interested in having a third party host all their key applications in this way.

For large organisations though, cloud computing is currently best looked at as an addition to the overall toolkit, with potential uses where appropriate. For example Amazon’s pay-as-you-go storage and processing services offer useful backups for coping with peak traffic levels if you need a top-up. If you have lots of remote or distributed workers, then Google Apps offers a convenient way to share documents and spreadsheets across the web. But I don’t think many big businesses will start putting their SAP or Oracle applications into the cloud – although proponents might argue that this wouldn’t be so different from outsourcing them to an external provider.

Issues such as security and data protection, as noted in the answers above, have not been fully tested in a cloud environment and will need to be addressed before we see any large-scale adoption.

Cloud computing is unlikely to take over from conventional IT models in the near future – it simply provides another option that may or may not be appropriate for you.

But as an indicator of things to come, it’s certainly worth keeping on your radar and investigating how it might support elements of your IT strategy.

By Bryan Glick, editor, Computing

Read more about the pIT stop here: www.computing.co.uk/pitstop