Get with The Cloud or run the risk of losing control of your IT infrastructure! That was the warning from Forrester Research at the firm's IT Forum in Berlin last week.
Trying to ban the use of Cloud applications or services will simply result in business units and lines of business people electing to by-pass the CIO and the IT department, warned Forrester principal analyst James Staten. "If you tell developers not to use public Clouds, they will go under the covers and do it anyway," he said.
Forrester suggests that good uses for public Clouds include specific projects, such as marketing and sales promotions, high-performance computing, and end of quarter financial results processing as well as enabling a 'suck it and see' option for new developments. "Clouds empower the spaghetti theory: throw it at the wall and see what sticks," said Staten.
Staten cited The New York Times as the “poster child” for how enterprises are engaging with Cloud Computing. The newspaper kept its archived article, pre-1922, on microfiche and as a jpeg file, but the articles were not available online and could not be searched. The paper's IT department said reverting all these articles, some 4TBs of data, into PDF files would use up server and storage resources and take more than a week. So they used Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), which was able to batch process the 4TBs of data in less than 24 hours.
The important thing is to find the areas and the businesses that are best suited to the Cloud Computing model. Staten picked out gaming companies as an example, firms which can take advantage of the flexibility and scalability of The Cloud. “If the application scales to a million users, then the gaming company is getting paid at the user base grows. Cloud aligns revenue with investment, so you can invest just in time, rather than upfront to match forecasts,” said Staten.
The critical value in Cloud Computing is “elasticity to supply peak demand without long-term commitment” said Staten. But he warned that the economics of Cloud Computing might not make sense for longer-term projects. “Hour per hour, Cloud costs more than traditional hosting but offers flexibility for peak loads,” he said. "The 10 cents per CPU hour model adds up. Over a month, it might even cost more than conventional hosting. It is a rental business."
There is also a danger that Cloud Computing becomes a new form of vendor lock-in. “You can be locked onto The Cloud,” warned Staten. “It is also hard to move an in-house application onto The Cloud, and once you've moved them on to The Cloud, you can't move them back.”
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