According to Randy Clark, chief marketing officer of Canadian Platform Computing, Cloud Computing has provided the impetus for IT to make a much needed shift in what it can offer users, though many in the industry are still struggling to understand its value. The company’s response to this dilemma has been to conduct a survey amongst users to try and identify the issues that are important to them.
The results are certainly interesting, if not a little pessimistic for those extolling the virtues of Cloud Computing, particularly from the users’ perspective. But they do point clearly to the important issue that all potential users of Cloud Computing need to make sure they can `walk’ in that changed environment before they try `running’.
As Clark observed, “as organizations continue to experiment with Cloud to move toward better efficiency and cost-savings, it is best to bear in mind that to ensure success, the adoption of cloud computing should follow a sequence of evolutionary steps rather than an overnight revolution.”
Platform conducted its survey at the last Supercomputing Conference, held last November. It asked 95 senior executives from the research, manufacturing, government and education industries about both their Cloud Computing concerns and their future plans for its implementation. The majority – 70% in fact – felt that the cloud would change very little of the structure of their organisations, which was coupled with an awareness that a successful cloud implementation tends to be predicated on the willingness of an organisation to evolve and transform to meet new organisational requirements.
This complements one of the other findings, which is that an even bigger proportion of the survey sample – 82% - do not see any requirement for cloud-bursting out into the public Cloud. Many of them also cited management and security issues as a reason for not reaching beyond their firewalls into the public cloud. Some 45% of them, however, are looking at the creation of private Clouds. Some are indicating that they see the value of private Cloud systems that are independent of location and resources ownership.
Such findings do, of course, raise the issue of the survey sample itself. Delegates at the Supercomputing Conference are, almost by definition, already owners and users of large amounts of `big tin’. Between then they own most of the biggest, most powerful systems available anywhere. Most of them are already running heavily virtualized systems operating in grids and clusters, so they have the basis of a private Cloud architecture in place. Many of them are also well aware that today’s supercomputing technologies and architectures are likely to be tomorrow’s biggest commercial systems.
Their growing interest in private Clouds, especially if coupled to management systems that are independent of location and resource ownership, actually demonstrates that they are much closer to the same Cloud models that many smaller businesses are now operating or seriously considering. In practice such businesses are operating private Clouds, even if they are sourced from and managed by third party service providers.
Improving operational efficiency was cited by 33% of respondents, making it the top reason for investing in a cloud solution, while the greatest expected benefits were seen as a larger resource pool (28%) and a more flexible, agile infrastructure (26%). On the downside, the major concerns about Cloud Computing remains security, with 49% citing that as a major issue. This was followed by complexity of management, at 31% and upfront costs, at 15%.
Public cloud not ready for enterprise applications. [edit]
Posted by altica (not verified) on Thu, 11/02/2010 - 12:57This echoes other research indicating that large organisations show a preference for private clouds for a variety of reasons including security and control.
This is not surprising given outages at cloud service providers (eg the recent one at Salesforce.com). There is currently little that can be done to improve resilience, and cloud SLA's tend to be light on escalation and penalties as they are geared towards a commoditised market.
A private cloud can have traditional controls arround resilience and continuity and also comes with defined responsibilities and escalation prcedures.
Public clouds seem to provide benefit for non-critical applications (spreadsheets, word processing etc) but is not yet mature enough to deliver a viable solution for enteprise applications.
Graham Perry
www.altica.co.uk
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