Having spent more than two decades in the IT industry, I’ve heard my share of hype – innovative, unique, new solutions that will revolutionise the way we think, feel and work. Occasionally these wonderful new technologies deliver on their promise, like a teenage football wunderkind becoming a World Cup winner. More often that not, however, they disappear without a trace, ending up in the IT equivalent of non-league.
I’m sure you’ll agree one of the most hyped terms of recent years is Cloud Computing (in this article I am referring to hosting provision in a Cloud rather than Software-as-a-Service). In one form or another, the concept of Cloud Computing – applications and computing power supported via the internet and accessible wherever anyone has a connection – has been thrown around for years. From what I’ve seen from vendors and the media, Cloud Computing is the term that’s going to stick.
What I haven’t seen as much of is how businesses can get the most out of the cloud. It’s easy to see the benefits: costing cutting, space saving, flexibility, huge amounts of storage at comparatively low cost. What I see a lack of is a solution to the issues: reliability, security, responsibility. My big concern with the Cloud as a CIO is responsibility. For my organisation, I’ll be the point man for anything that goes into the cloud. The questions that I’ll be asked by my board are the ones I need to ask the people operating Cloud Computing services. Unfortunately, at the moment, when Cloud Computing providers suffer high profile outages, the answers that are forthcoming don’t satisfy me or my board. Vague statements about outages and overloads point to the cause – they don’t promise it won’t happen again, they don’t offer me compensation and they don’t offer me reassurances that there are back up systems in place.
With this in mind, I recently attended an event run by NTT Europe Online, a managed hosting provider of which PLC is a customer. NTT was launching a report ‘Cloud or Fog?’, which had surveyed 200 UK CIOs and CFOs about their attitudes and investment priorities when it came to the cloud. At the event, I and another customer discussed why we would hesitate before throwing our critical business units into the cloud. One of the key issues was that of location: where was the data kept? If I’m asked by a board member to show them where such-and-such a unit’s data is kept when we’re using on-premise servers, I can take them down to the stack and point to the blade that holds whatever it is they are interested in. As a non-technical person, that physicality is a reassurance to them. When it comes to the Cloud, I can’t do that. I can’t even say, as we can with our managed hosting platform, that it’s run out of a network of servers based in Frankfurt , Madrid , Paris and London . For all I know, the servers supporting our part of the Cloud could be floating off Greenland .
This is the crux of the matter: when it comes to the Cloud, too much of it is vague. I’m not alone in feeling this. NTT’s report found that 46% of respondents felt definitions of Cloud Computing remained unclear. When it came to levels of adoption, 77% of people worked in organisations that weren’t using it. Their primary concerns were security, reliability and immaturity of concept.
In order to embrace the Cloud, I need it to understand what my priorities are. I need someone responsible and answerable, who can provide a secure, reliable service that never goes down, and if it does, shows me exactly how they’ll ensure it’ll never go down again. The services I need are being delivered today in a way that is increasingly being referred to as a private Cloud.
Private Cloud takes the flexibility and cost effectiveness of the Cloud concept and marries it to the level of service one would expect from a trusted supplier. By partnering with an experienced managed hosting provider, one with the network and capabilities to support elements of a business, if not in its entirety, companies can tap into this holy grail. A single provider that has dedicated account management, direct dial numbers and human voices on the ends of phones will take the responsibility for a private cloud. It will put in place the security features enterprises require to safeguard their data, whilst its expertise in delivering hosting platforms should ensure that the private Cloud is reliable and available. If for any reason it is not, it will have the customer service in place to provide people with detailed reasons and demonstrate future preventative measures. In most cases, unavailability will be mitigated by developed redundancy packages, where failure in one part of the network is mitigated by another part.
If I’m to take my company into the Cloud, I need all these things in place. It’s time for the hype to stop, and questions to be answered. If Cloud Computing is to be a success, it needs large scale enterprises to be using it. For such organisations to even contemplate moving its non-core business units into a Cloud environment, Cloud solutions need to demonstrate the properties that, today, are only found in private Clouds. For myself, a sensible, secure private Cloud platform hosted by a reputable managed hosting provider with a track record in delivering business success via the internet is the only current way I’ll take a step into Cloud Computing.
Eric Brown is Chief Technology Officer at Practical Law Company
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