Cloud Computing Dreams Crash into Reality

The
promised benefits of cloud computing may be huge from easy collaboration to big
cost savings, but relying on the cloud for computing presents its own set of
problems. That’s according to partners, customers and experts at a Cisco Live roundtable
which shattered a few myths and highlighted some key problems that need to be
solved.

Licensing
issues, security problems, unrealized cost savings and unreliable
infrastructures are among some of the problems that partners and customers are
facing.

Lew
Tucker, CTO and vice president of cloud computing at Cisco Systems, kicked off
the discussion by asking “is the enterprise ready for the cloud?” There didn’t
seem to be a good answer, with the comments running somewhere on the fence.
Some enterprises are absolutely ready for the cloud, some have tried it and
been disappointed, and others are merely looking at it as a long-term
applications delivery model that they’ll eventually want to use.

“We’re
seeing all sorts of customers along the path,” said Joe Crawford, the cloud
infrastructure group lead at Verizon.

In
some cases, customers are already seeing beyond the cloud hype and tailoring
their computing not towards the cloud model but towards an applications
delivery model. It’s a minor – but important – difference. He noted that he has
one customer that doesn’t have a cloud strategy; instead, the customer has an
applications strategy and has chosen to use cloud as its tool to bring that
strategy to life.

One
of the most common perceptions about the cloud computing model is that it’ll
save businesses of all sizes bundles of money, but Lawrence McNutt, CTO and
owner of SOS (the lone systems integrator on the panel), shattered that myth
when he said it can actually be more costly to businesses if they’re not
careful.

As
a systems integrator that provides SaaS offerings to its customers, SOS (http://www.team-sos.com/)
is a Loomis, Calif.-based Cisco channel partner. McNutt said that the SaaS
delivery model makes financial sense for some businesses and not for others. In
fact, McNutt said he fields questions from clients about the cost-effectiveness
of cloud all the time, and he can’t provide an affirmative answer in a lot of
cases.

“When
it boils right down to dollars and cents, it’s not consistently more
cost-effective,” McNutt said.

A
key problem is that many businesses thinking moving to the cloud is as easy as
flipping a switch. Voila! Instant cost savings. It’s never that simple, but
vendors and partners constantly have to combat that perception.

“Often
we hear that people want to move to the cloud because it’s more cost-effective.
That’s their primary driver,” said Wyatt Starnes, CTO and vice president for
advanced technologies at Harris Corp. However, if a business hasn’t made the
necessary transitions with its people and processes within its corporate
environment first, then it’s probably not going to be more cost-effective to
use the cloud. It’s more effective once the people and processes have been
prepared for the shift in the applications delivery model. That doesn’t happen
overnight, Starnes said.

Businesses
also have to have taken the first couple of steps towards virtualization for it
to work, Tucker added.

Security
is frequently cited as another hurdle, but vendor executives have often
commented that because of where and how the data is being stored, the cloud is
actually more secure than on-premise means. That hasn’t changed the perception
of the public cloud, of course, especially considering the number of
high-profile online data breaches that have hit the headlines.

Businesses
are looking for three key things when it comes to the delivery of the
applications that run their business – performance, availability and security.
Many potential customers are not yet satisfied they have the answers they’re
looking for when it comes to any of those three, but security is still a top concern
because of the costly nature (in dollars from existing customers and in
potential loss of future customers).

Similar
to the dot-com boom, new businesses that want to cash in on the cloud computing
trend are popping up every day, but McNutt said that doesn’t mean they’re doing
their due diligence when it comes to secure, reliability, performance or
availability. In many cases, actually, the opposite is true. Businesses trust
their data to cloud providers of all types, but it can be disastrous

“I’ve
seen a lot of catastrophic deployments where they just didn’t have the
infrastructure to justify that trust,” McNutt said.

According
to McNutt, the vast majority of companies that have opened their doors as cloud
providers don’t have the rigorous infrastructure and support structure in place
to have earned the trust their customers are giving them.

“The
vast majority of my cloud clients came from another provider,” McNutt said.

Many
cloud service providers are also stuck in their ways with the way they think about
their software licensing models. This is a serious problem because old
licensing models don’t fit well with the cloud. As they transition to newer
billing models, there is a great amount of confusion because there are so many
different models.

“I
think there’s a lot of licensing issues that still remain,” Starnes said.

Legacy
software companies are slow in determining their cloud pricing or they’re
stalling so they can get their own cloud services in place, Starnes said.

There
are clearly several challenges to overcome in the growing cloud computing
market, but if historical IT trends are any indication, eventually these
challenges will be overcome and standards will fall into place.