Seeing the Light through Cloud

84 days, 17 hours, 01 minutes and 52 seconds

till my Churchill Trip - 11th May - 13th July 2012

Seeing the light

Cloud Computing has the Solutions for all Technology Problems
Cloud is not a solution for everything. But it will drive long-term benefits, those benefit will be realise more as time progresses after implementation. As with all solutions there are implementation and security issues to be addressed as with all IT projects. Recognising the importance of the data, classifying and putting in the appropriate backups and accountability are still as important in the cloud or in your own data centre.

The offerings of cloud are the flexibility of the structure, location and costs. The move to the cloud is not a technology debate but a business discussion based on business needs and outcomes. As with all business decisions it must be focused on the long-term productivity and value to the company and its offering to the customer.

The costing of such solutions will change the landscape of costing from a capital expense to operational expense. Where infrastructure was a physical asset and managed as a capital expense the cloud is fee for service model shifting that cost to operational. There needs to be a cost benefit analysis that can show the benefits as well as reflecting the change in cost model. But the business needs to focus more on the long term benefits with the distribution of the hard costs over to the soft costs.

The value proposition for the flexibility that cloud offers and the potential to scale as needed and the agility to do that would have to be of benefit to any organisation.

The Cloud is Just a Fad

The term Cloud is relatively new, but the idea and concepts are as old as computing. If you think back to when the main frames started it would have to fall under the definition in some way of a cloud solution. The Federal Government of Australia's Cloud Computing Definition (borrowed from the US NIST) is:

“Cloud computing is an ICT sourcing and delivery model for enabling convenient,
on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources
(e.g. networks, servers, storage, applications and services) that can be rapidly
provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.”

I strongly believe that the whole term cloud computing has clouded the situation and that we need to get through it and see the day light. So basically Cloud computing is a service to be consumed. That service can come in many different forms and structures and it is up to business to define what they need. This needs to be taken out of the technical realm and discussed from a business perspective.

The Cloud is another IT offering and the Landscape will stay the same

This is going to be one of the biggest change makers to the IT Landscape with respect to the jobs and people who will be involved. Many of the roles today in IT will disappear and new roles will appear but working in the virtual space and not with the nuts and bolts or boxes and processers. That transmission is happening as we speak and at first there will be need of those roles but as more and more of the cloud becomes available work will move into that virtual space for a while. But more and more our services will be delivered via a shop front. Like we use the iShop and Android Market place we will navigate to a location select what we want use it and lose it. Pay for that time and service and move on. We are seeing this with our offerings with the tablets Apple, Google and Microsoft all are moving us to that shop front. Se are you going to be at the virtual shop front of will you want to have a personal developer and infrastructure to purchase, manage and hope to get what you want and then invite your customer to your front door??

The Cloud is not secure

To justify the economies of scale the cloud is fundamentally a multi-tenanted environment. Due to this fact security is one of the key services offered and paramount to the entire business model. Securities in most organisations are concerned about their traditional risks, ie the firewalls, and network internally and externally protecting the entry points. The security in the cloud becomes the underpinning foundation to all that is served from within that environment. It requires a solid design and operational rigor where security is the priority.

As with our data no matter where it exists we need to be vigilant and ask the questions on what and how security is run and managed. This is no different to security as a whole. But again it is back to business, the classification of the data and where it is stored and managed. Considering a hybrid solution and placing the appropriate data in the appropriate location.

The cloud is not reliable

You can say this about all it and infrastructure internally or externally. But again given the scale of Cloud computing services they are designed for high availability and redundancy. While to achieve that internally is usually to cost prohibitive, the Cloud enables a higher level of reliability at a fraction of that cost that could be achieve internally. Organisations are now looking at this flexibility and cost savings in the area of Disaster Recovery. In the past organisations would setup a secondary datacentre location with a second set of physical equipment which would sit there just in case. Mean time the costs involved were very high for no real outcome other than an insurance policy. Cloud is able to offer the service where until you require the service there is a smaller cost to just hold the position and then switch on when needed.

Customers lose control and are getting locked-in

Again this is a business requirement and topic. Yes there may be some cloud offering which do try to lock your data down. These won’t last as the data belongs to the client. But from the business perspective if this is the need then it would be a requirement of the condition they would sign. Businesses are not going to lock their data and not have mobility.

The Cloud is too complex

As with all technology has complexity. It is a matter of finding the solution your business requires. The level of simplicity and control usually determine the level of complexity. This again the business will define and the Cloud can offer a good balance to this issue.

Pay as you go cloud pricing will cost more

The costs associated with cloud will change how we pay for our technology. The old model used the capital expense model with an operational budget to run the technology. With Cloud that will change and that expense will come from operational costs. So there will need to be a re-alignment of budgets and where we place that money to distribute. Understanding of the cost model and working with Pay-as-you-go will require a different understanding. There are potential cost savings but if a business is dynamic and we are unable to predict the highs and low our costs will reflect those changes. But if we go on the model that a high demand means we are getting a higher level of income then cost can be justified. Our cost predictions and how we model for growth will need us to rethink this area of our business budget.

I have to shift everything into the Cloud

Not all applications are suitable for the cloud. Our data has many different classifications and risks associated with it so dependent on that fact you can use a hybrid model to maximise the benefits. Again the business needs to analysis what the business issues are and the value of the benefit to move to the Cloud. The Cloud is not a silver bullet, it is a tool which will offer flexibility, agility and scalability to business in the future.

These are just a couple of myths around cloud. As time goes on more will come and a lot more will go. So where are you? Do you have your head in the clouds or are you seeing some light. J