Is the public cloud a viable option for business-critical systems

Most CIOs will admit to feeling anxious at the thought of taking their company’s core infrastructure and services and putting them in the hands of a vendor to run, monitor and control, which is why the word “risk” has become synonymous with the cloud.

Where do the risks lie? The list of problem areas is long and daunting, with outages, questionable service level agreements (SLAs), data retrieval, loss of data, liability and loss of control all featuring heavily.

But the cloud market that CIOs are faced with today isn’t as immature as it was 12 months ago. So, should IT leaders set aside their concerns and egos and take the plunge?

Richard Norris, IT director at insurance intermediary consolidator Cullum Capital Ventures (CCV), believes that the benefits of scalability and speed of deployment far outweigh the risks.

“We currently use InTechnology’s hosted platform on which we host our Exchange server environment,” says Norris.

“We decided to abandon an on-premise solution because CCV is currently making approximately one acquisition per month, which means that our user base is constantly changing, as are our data storage requirements,” he adds.

Norris decided to migrate to a hosted environment in August 2010 when CCV was facing an Exchange integration project involving 150 users, which would have pushed the limits of the company’s storage capabilities.

The hosted Exchange server was up and running in six weeks, and then CCV executed a number of staged mailbox moves over the following few weeks. The company has about 900 staff spread across 50 offices in the UK.

“A hosted server platform allows us to flex our resources in line with business requirements, without me having to go out and buy an oversized piece of tin, which is what I would have had to do if I had built an on-premise solution,” says Norris.

To allay his business continuity and security concerns, Norris carried out due diligence checks on InTechnology’s datacentre and purchased additional backup services.

“We had already undertaken due diligence on InTechnology’s datacentre in the past, so we knew that the build and functionality of it is comparable to one I would host my own solution in,” says Norris.

“InTechnology backs up the data from the Exchange server and hosts that in a London-based datacentre, so it is backed up off-site from the server in Harrogate,” he adds.