The Infant
There is no question this generalization we term ‘Cloud Computing’ is an infant. There is even some debate about what truly constitutes cloud computing, being that it encompasses anything from a simple virtual server to hosted application services. As with any venture infancy challenges abound and the ability of the industry to identify and face it’s problems will have a big impact on the level of it’s success.
The clear and loud pitch of cloud computing is to save money and to IT Managers under cost and staffing pressure it’s a place of nirvana where more is delivered for less. What I venture to suggest is early adopters need to be smarted than late comers because as lessons are learned it’s customers getting burned. At the moment even some basic problems have yet to be addressed, for example listen to these stories:
Credit card data is found in emails passing through your scanning gateway and your PCI auditor starts making demands about data control and logging that your service provider has zero interest in providing.
Your cloud hosted partners turn out to be less than honest and load up the hardware you both are virtualized on impacting on your performance. Of course, you have no visibility of this, all you can see is the performance slowly gets worse and worse and worse. You’re completely reliant on your provider to be honest and then step up and make changes.
Suddenly every third email you get has a corrupt attachment, but your SLA (if you have one) doesn’t cover actually performance of the service so much as the simple availability of the service. Predictably your provider swears you are the only customer in the world with this problem and blames you.
Out of the blue your service provider sends you a legal notification informing you some or all of your personal data may have been compromised, including your logon to your server farm. It’s all very short on details and because you don’t reside in the same country whether US disclosure laws apply or not is unclear. Some or all of your data may or may not have been passed to the FBI and the matter is now a crime investigation so they offer no other comment.
None of these stories is made up, one of them happened to us and the other three to customers who shared their experiences with me. What they highlight is infancy. None of them is particularly insurmountable and with more time and as more players climb into the space with a value added mentality it’s fair to expect performance measures, management interfaces and flexibility to improve. In the meantime it’s buyer beware.
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