23 May 2011
The recent Amazon outage shows that large-scale, essentially self-managed and commoditised infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) has price benefits but, if things go wrong, they do so in a big way (Amazon finally apologises for outage).
On-demand, pay-as-you-go capacity has become the norm, but the operational side of the public cloud is a key issue for business. It provides a management challenge as the public cloud is primarily a service bought without any commitment or contract.
Amazon has been less than frank about the resilience of its service, but no competitor has publicly shamed it, highlighting the fact that everyone knows that large-scale outages are possible, and that more are likely.
This is not a question of competence: in technology, things can go wrong. The question is how to manage risk when the parameters for doing so in public cloud are less than clear.
As an alternative, the private cloud could provide organisations with the benefits of managed virtualisation and a rental consumption model for compute and storage, while also allowing them to perform due diligence on the infrastructure.
Dr Aydin Kurt-Elli, Lumison
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