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Make no mistake, despite very public emarrassments at Sony and Amazon, cloud computing is here to stay. IT providers need to embrace the paradigm and IT users need to see beyond the hype and plan the best delivery platform for the services their business depends on.

(In fact the cloud paradigm is not so new: BT deliver voice and the BBC deliver TV and radio from “the cloud” to customers who have no involvement with the technology or processes that the services depend on).

Sony left a security loophole which allowed thousands of Playstation users’ details to be revealed. Amazon carried out a network upgrade which went wrong and denied companies access to AWS services for 10 days.

There are two lessons that I would draw from these recent incidents:

One: No one is too big to fail

The first is not to make assumptions about the performance, reliability or security of cloud IT services just because they are delivered by a huge multinational. You would imagine that Microsoft, Google, Sony and Amazon has armies of highly qualified and experienced IT staff, manning vast datacentres providing the finest available IT services. You’d be right, but that didn’t stop all four organisations having falures in systems or security relating to cloud services in the last couple of years. There will undoubtedly be more.

An intelligent approach to using cloud services would be to ensure that you do not place too much reliance on one provider: Amazon client companies who handled the AWS outage best had actually planned for such an eventuality and had a failover plan ready. Some were able to get going again in less 15 minutes.

The same logic that applies to any IT system applies to cloud services: plan for the day when it will fail and don’t assume that it is immune because of a particular brand name.

Two: Reversed economy of scale?

The other lesson is that big providers, despite having virtually limitless resources, do make attractive targets for organised hacking campaigns. It wasn’t heavily publicised at the time but in January 2010, Google discovered that they were being comprehensively hacked by the Chinese. The doors were subsequently bolted and Google even took steps to hack the perpetrators back. However, given that the Chinese government are likely to have every line of Google code up to January 2010, at what point should businesses become confident enough to switch their email to the Google platform?

Oil & gas companies have plenty to worry about on this score since the global energy industry was targeted by a well-organised network hacking campaign in Februuary 2011 – dubbed Night Dragon by McAfee.

Our recommendation is that companies should examine the pros and cons of any IT service, cloud or onsite, from the perspectives of performance, security, service levels and features as well as cost. A knee-jerk reaction aimed at reducing the cost of an expensive IT department could easily backfire if the decision were entered into without some detailed analysis beforehand.

Now that Internet connections are faster, cheaper and more reliable, offering services across the net can be a reality.

This year I have sat through too many presentations on the topic of Cloud Computing. These are usually at vendor events where they explain how their products are the key to unlocking the benefits of Cloud Computing.

Along with Virtualisation, the “Cloud” has been one the favourite buzzwords of sales and marketing people across the land. These dull slideshows usually begin with “What is Cloud Computing? If you ask 10 people you’ll get 10 different answers” Yawn. Next they give the example of SalesForce.com as a leader in the field. As if we didn’t know. (The BBC have been offering “cloud” services for decades: you don’t have to have a band in your living room to listen to some music, like you used to in the olden days).

#CloudForce

The truth is that most people in business and the IT industry have a crystal clear understanding of what Cloud services offer. This was apparent from the packed audience of at least a thousand eager attendees at SalesForce’s CloudForce event yesterday at the Novotel in Hammersmith.

#SalesForce’s charismatic CEO Marc Benioff gave a compelling and very polished keynote presentation of how their products are changing how companies can get better applications to their staff far more quickly and far more affordably.

Quick effective ERP over the web

Benioff drew in senior staff from companies such as BMC Software, Vetrazzo and the Daily Telegraph. For example Vetrazzo started up 4 years ago and turn recycled glass into kitchen worktops: they developed a whole business process management system in a few months using custom tools from SalesForce. The result is that they have something which is available to all their locations via the web and can be modified really easily to suit changing or new requirements.

#ITIL Helpdesk Example

BMC Software, vendors of helpdesk application Remedy, explained how they developed a fully functional ITIL conformant helpdesk system within 4 weeks. ISN are committed to using the ITIL framework throughout our company to deliver better service to our customers. So we were very interested to hear about this in particular.

#Cloud computing business tools

ISN have been using SalesForce.com for a few years now and find it a great improvement over other CRM systems we tried. We will be looking very closely at using SalesForce’s newest tools to develop new systems that support our own business and for opportunities where cloud services from #SalesForce and other organisations can help our clients businesses too.

Cloud computing is one of this year’s hot topics. In a nutshell, it means locating your computing resources somewhere else, usually in a data centre run by a hosting company.

Many businesses are hoping that cloud computing will be a panacea to solve all the problems that appear to come from their computer room and all those troublesome servers.

However, even if your servers are located at some third party hosting site and managed by people who don’t work for you, those pesky problems may still occur and the overall costs may be less than owning and running your own servers.

Consultants from McKinsey & Co have produced a report which shows that moving your computing to the cloud could be a costly mistake. The McKinsey study, entitled “Clearing the Air on Cloud Computing” claims that outsourcing a typical data centre to the cloud could even double costs!

The report goes on to say that businesses could do better by running their own servers and using virtualisation to run them more efficiently. This approach may indeed hold the key to greater cost savings.

We at ISN tend to agree. While neither cloud computing or virtualisation will cure all corporate IT headaches, there is a place for both and, used to fulfill definite objectives, both can provide cost savings and better performing IT for businesses.

For instance, certain tedious but crucial tasks, like spam and virus filtering can be transferred to “the cloud” in the form of Microsoft Exchange Hosted Services for an insignificant cost and can deliver quick returns in terms of increased productivity and better security.

Similarly, our LiveVault online backup solution is a cloud-based application, which creates backups off site every 15 minutes at far less cost than an in-house solution could.

The cloud is fine for utility jobs like these, but the same approach doesn’t work so well for business critical applications where tighter control, flexibility and integration with other systems are high priorities. Costs of owning hardware are low in reality since they can be depreciated over several years or even written off against tax. Most organisations are having to get leaner in the way they use IT and server virtualisation is a clear way of squeezing more value out of your data centre.

We would welcome your opinions on this topic. Please leave a comment or email us.