The ground rules of cloud
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It is time to address the practical considerations of the cloud
The practical considerations of the move to cloud computing warrant careful consideration, as Information Age’s Hosting & Managed Services event discovered
The potential benefits of cloud computing are by now well understood. The task the IT community in 2010 faces is to develop the operating practices that will ensure that the promise of cloud is realised, while the potential dangers of the delivery model are not. This was the topic of Information Age’s Hosting & Managed Services event that took place in London in April.
According to Dr Katy Ring, director at analyst group K2 Advisory, cloud computing itself is not so much a revolutionary development as the latest step in an ongoing shift within IT. “Cloud is very much the topic of the year,” she told delegates. “[But] it’s only the latest manifestation of a profound industry change that has been happening for more than 15 years.”
Dr Ring cited network computing (as touted by Oracle and Sun during the 1990s), software-as-a-service (SaaS) and utility computing as previous incarnations of the same phenomenon. She said the cloud is currently still outside the mainstream of business computing. “There is a lot of experimentation [with cloud] going on in small pockets of organisations,” she said. “But we've now reached the point where the consideration is whether it can be pushed forward to become a more central part of an organisation.”
Dr Ring predicted that medium-sized businesses will lead the way in cloud adoption, thanks to their relative agility compared to larger organisations.
The security concerns that have slowed adoption are understandable but have been "over-hyped”, Ring said. A recent K2 survey found that a third of respondents believe that the cloud provides neither stronger nor weaker defenses than traditional client-server computing.
"In a cloud environment, service providers can call on extra defensive resources like filtering and re-routing, they can roll out new security patches more efficiently and can keep more evidence for diagnostics,” she explained. “There are benefits as well as drawbacks.”
Exactly where traditional hosting ends and cloud computing begins is a debate that has been perennially muddied by the myriad of definitions applied to the cloud. Conference delegates heard Chris Higgins, product and services development manager of SunGard Availability Services, explain in detail where the differences lie.
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