The Cloud Conundrum explained

Think for a moment about the software and IT systems you use in your personal life. Not the Excel spreadsheets you plan the budget on, or the creaking database used inside the company for planning appointments, but the systems you use because you want to use them.What kind of applications are they? Perhaps you use Facebook to keep in touch with friends and family, or YouTube to upload your personal videos and to watch movie trailers and music videos. Flickr or Picasa to store your personal photo collection – after all, when was the last time you took photographs using film that needed to be developed?All these systems are easy to use, robust, reliable, and don’t need any kind of local infrastructure. They work entirely within a browser on any kind of hardware and they offer apparently unlimited storage space. I should know,Â I’ve uploaded nearly 900 videos to YouTubeÂ so far and over 10,000 photographs toÂ Flickr. These tools are an essential part of daily life for me and have been so for about five years.This is cloud computing. Forget the hyperbole you read in the media about the future of computing. For most of us, it’s already here and we already operate in the cloud. Just it’s mostly personal, rather than business related. Our personal use of technology systems and the infrastructure used to deliver those services is far more advanced than that used in almost any organisation.So how do we move from a situation where our personal IT footprint can almost entirely exist in the cloud - using tools such as Google Mail, Google Docs, and photo, video, and document sharing sites – to a point where this is accepted business practice?It’s a tall order. IT leaders have a different focus to personal end users, particularly when it comes to availability and security. These are particularly important factors when the IT service is purchased from a supplier and will translate into key performance indicators applied to a service level agreement. The small print of the publicly available services does include information about service levels, but it will just excuse the provider from any responsibility to give you a reliable service.If Google Mail was never available when you wanted to use it then it would be abandoned and never used, but it’s reliable enough for most people. However, a regular user doesn’t have much control. I can only stamp my feet in anger if I need to send an urgent email and Google has decided to take the service down for an hour for maintenance.It’s true there is a more reliable – and paid - enterprise version of Google’s mail and office applications. Some companies are already taking the plunge and ditching their thick-client email systems. It’s more than a year now sinceÂ Guardian News and Media Group in the UKÂ switched 2500 users over to Google Apps and with it being such an easy financial decision, more will follow.And this is the reality of cloud computing. It’s out there and feasible today, but the term is confused and spread across a number of services that I want to explore over the next few articles here on SSON.In particular, infrastructure as a service, software as a service, and utility computing. Can the cloud model offer a future scenario for IT leaders where capital expenditure is almost zero because the back-end, and front-end of almost all business applications can be purchased and paid for only when needed?If so, what does that mean for the IT supplier community currently offering outsourced services that bear no resemblance to what their customers can use online at no cost?(Mark will continue this discussion on 'Cloud Computing' next week)

The Cloud Conundrum explained

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