Learning to live in the clouds

I hate that what is ultimately the bundling of good network and operational practices with excess capacity gets the attention it deserves only because of some marketing blitz.

An AARNET engineer recently vented to me that they have been providing cloud services for 20 years, nevertheless without the fancy name. I can truly sympathise with his sentiment yet there is something more to the success of cloud computing than a shiny buzzword.

In my opinion a big key to cloud computing adoption is that it has achieved an ease of use that anyone with an email address and credit card can start to see what the fuss is about. Free, nevertheless limited accounts and super simple sign-up have gotten many people I know over that first price hurdle to for the moment give it a try.

However the idea that the cloud is solely for independent developers without means is not grounded in reality. Telsyte recently released The Telsyte Australian Infrastructure and Cloud Computing Market Study 2012 estimated that "about 35 per cent of Australian enterprises are subscribing to some type of IaaS or PaaS cloud service, with the majority of subscriptions, and data, heading to overseas providers”.

The cloud computing

While it might so then be that Australian businesses are overcoming their skepticism of the cloud computing and even embracing the benefits it will not be without teething problems.

Technical concerns aside, Platform as a Service will probably require changes to or for the moment reviews of operational risk, security, network and customer privacy policies, to name nevertheless a few. It is not that putting some of your products and services into the cloud automatically exposes you to any worse risks than operating your own networks, yet we should go in with eyes open.

In recent times there have been plenty of examples of sticky situations, that during not explicitly the fault of the cloud, has exposed a soft underbelly to shared services. MegaUpload is just one such saga where foreign governments and hosting location can in all seriousness complicate your business. Legitimate users of MegaUpload have had their data locked away from them and the hosting company is in limbo because their servers are now evidence in an international copyright fracas.

Suddenly the developers aren’t able to reach the production site they were working on. This example is not a cloud computing issue however there could be scenarios where governments block or sanction action against countries that happen to be hosting large portions of your cloud provider's platform.

Your business is now influenced by politics. Big PaaS operators will have many sites spread throughout the world to counter such disturbances, nevertheless it is another thing to be aware of, and even question, the provider about their ability to route around such issues.

The most obvious benefits lie come when the business can take the best of both worlds, using cloud computing to help boost capacity without taking on additional hard costs. The biggest winner, in my experience, are the businesses that see PaaS as a vehicle to prototype and experiment with new products and services cheaply. As the product proves itself, decisions can be made about bringing it back in internally where maximum control can be exercised.

I think even if your business has made a decision not to look into cloud technology for the time being, you however may want to be aware of the research stack and foster some familiarity with it. It may be that you have to deploy to the cloud because of a change of heart or because you have just bought a business that lives in the cloud and now have its products and services in your stable.