Cloud Computing: When Does It Make Sense?
Posted on 01. Dec, 2008 by vbrown in Cloud Computing
Cloud Computing: Is it a revolutionary new approach to providing IT products and services? Or a marketing opportunity? We’ve been evolving to on-site Cloud Computing for a decade. Isn’t off-site Cloud Computing just the latest innovation in outsourcing—which the industry’s been promoting in various forms since the middle of the 20th century?
I’m a strong proponent of the on-site Cloud—virtualization, intranet-based, services-based composite applications, location transparency, contract-based integration. . . Unfortunately, in spite of how far the enabling technologies have evolved, I still have many of the same concerns about the risks of outsourcing IT resources and services that I’ve always had. A few of the most obvious include:
· First, commodity platforms (hardware, networks, storage)and business functionality (applications, SaaS)make perfect sense as opportunities to let someone else manage them—putting them in an off-site Cloud is fine as long as the business won’t fail if they become unavailable for a few hours/days.
· Core systems, on which the business is dependent, need to be controlled, secured and maintained as critical assets—and often as competitive differentiators.
· Enterprise data assets must also be protected to ensure operational integrity, legislated compliance, privacy, competitive advantage, and for a number of other reasons.
· Given the still-vulnerable nature of the global Internet infrastructure (witness the recent security hole revealed by Kaminsky) how confident can we be that SLAs and security can be guaranteed?
Just because something is hyped in the industry doesn’t mean it’s bad—although the reaction of hard-nosed skeptics might create the impression that “hype”, itself is a bad thing. Service Orientation—from architecture (SOA) to enterprise (SOE)—has been a truly beneficial paradigm shift, but the marketing hype could make you think it was snake oil!
So… I’d be interested to know what you think about Cloud Computing (the off-site kind) and how much of the current hype is just the marketing machine.
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