A kinder, gentler cloud
Remember how cloud computing was supposed to kill client/server? Turns out it’s more of a wedding than a funeral.
First, some background: The hype surrounding cloud computing in recent years has been nothing short of wild. If you believed the popular wisdom, the traditional computing model was toast. Businesses were going to stop loading specialized programs onto workers’ PCs and buying expensive software and servers for data centers.
Instead, we’d have the cloud. Service providers like Salesforce.com (CRM) and Amazon (AMZN) would own the hardware and software, and let companies plug in over the Internet and use it on demand.
Things aren’t working out that way. A survey commissioned by Avanade, a joint venture between Microsoft (MSFT) and Accenture (ACN), shows that enterprises are taking a more cautious approach to cloud computing. While 62% of the 500-plus executives surveyed said they plan to increase their use of cloud-based software over the next year, they had no intention of simply shipping their proprietary data out to some third-party service provider n the process. Some 80% of U.S. enterprises will instead embrace what’s being called a “hybrid” cloud model – they’ll let third parties handle basic stuff in external clouds, but keep vital information on company-owned servers inside the firewall.
Meanwhile, tech titans are also taking aim at the “everything in the cloud” crowd. According to a CNET report, Hewlett-Packard CEO Mark Hurd this week said that security is a major issue that doesn’t get enough attention in the cloud debate; if HP CIO Randy Mott told him he wanted to put the company’s financial records in the cloud, “I’d say, ‘Go back to work, we’re not doing that.’” Oracle (ORCL) CEO Larry Ellison has also taken shots at cloud boosters.
It might be tempting to dismiss all this as self-serving resistance from the old-school techs – but even the biggest cloud cheerleaders are now embracing the hybrid concept. On a stage near the Oracle Openworld conference last week, Salesforce CEO Mark Benioff embraced Dell (DELL) CEO Michael Dell to announce a partnership to sell customers on the hybrid cloud idea – an initiative called “The Best of Both Worlds.”
For Benioff, who until now has marketed Salesforce with a “Software is Dead” slogan, that’s quite a shift. But since enterprises aren’t about to ditch their client/server IT investments and put all their secrets on the Internet, it’s also a wise one.
The question isn’t really about “to cloud or not to cloud” but “when and how?” Thousands of CFOs already trust their business critical data to SaaS, on-demand or “cloud” providers, whose infrastructure can be much more robust and secure than what they use internally. At Concur, we’re asking “how else can we best leverage the cloud?”
Not only is our travel and expense management service delivered on-demand, we’re also pushing the infrastructure that delivers it into the cloud. We don’t make those decisions lightly, as thousands of companies and millions of employees globally rely on our service every day. Call it SaaS, on-demand or Cloud Computing, but whatever you call it, it had better work when the client needs it, and it must always be secure.
Lots of apologists for cloud computing commenting on this article. Again, I don't think S&P companies want their financial information stored on the cloud. Its just too risky.
There isn’t any question that cloud computing currently poses some challenges. Long-term, they will be overcome, just as the challenges with client-server, Unix, Windows, etc. were overcome. Cloud computing will be an enormously important part of our future. The cost advantage is great too great to ignore. =
Most 'traditional' IT infrastructures offer users a method of remote connection. Cloud computing actually uses the same technology and more to make it easier to use, and available to more users.
Keep in mind that data security also includes redundancy and historic archival in addition to the prevention of un-authorized access.
At IVDesk.com we've been providing remote access to applications and data to our customers for 8 years. In every case, the security around customer data was dramatically improved.
It is a little early to declare that the cloud will not replace on-premise computing. That certainly is the trend and it is accelerating. Once the cloud supports good encryption of all data, the security objections will lose their force. Even today, the SFDC data store is more secure than the one at your company.
With regards to the cloud computing phenomenon, I highly recommended the book, The Big Switch. The author draws an interesting and compelling analogy between the electrical grid and the burgeoning cloud computing grid. The distribution of electrical power changed the industrial age; the cloud computing and its related technologies will change the information age and society.
The economic benefits of cloud computing will be hard to ignore as cloud computing service providers (e.g., salesforce.com, amazon EC2, etc..) drive prices even lower as they gain even larger economics of scale. The current technical hurdles associated with cloud computing (e.g., data security, performance, virtualization vendor impedance, etc…) will be overcome. In the near-term, there will certainly be a bias towards private and hybrid clouds. However, over time, I suspect that the majority of consumer and corporate computing assets will reside in the public cloud. For some additional background and comments: http://blogs.liquidhub.com/rbordogna/?p=166