Cloud - Is it really what you think it is ?

Do you remember SOA ? It was yester-year's buzz-word de jour... Service Oriented Architecture was a definition of a modular, pluggable architecture for building applications. It was a methodology, not a thing. And yet CIO's believed that they could trust their vendors to sell them some SOA ! I recall a bad TV commercial, where the cardboard cutout Sales Guy responds to all queries with : "Great, you'll take 500 !". *** Note: if somebody finds the advertisement in a YouTube video, I'll link it here ***

The new hype is all around cloud computing services. The idea is straightforward: a client consumes computing resources from any end-point, at any time, without caring about the infrastructure behind it. So let's use real terms... You can access Google Documents via the Internet (ubiquitous access), open a document stored somewhere (you need not know where) using an application provided by Google. 

This is called Software as a Service (SaaS). SaaS represents the first real implementation of "cloud". That service can be free of charge (ala Google Docs), or have an associated costs. This fits into what makes Cloud appealing. CIOs are attempting to rationalize their budgets into business-consumable terms. They want to know the cost per month/per application/per user. Cloud allows them to follow that model, as that is how SaaS is sold.

But one of the key issues that cloud doesn't address sufficiently is governance. For almost every industry that might really benefit from cloud, there are stringent regulations which regulate the industry. For example in Canada, there are strict laws which dictate that Electronic Medical Records must stay inside of Provincial boundaries. How can a cloud provider guarantee that the data stays within the boundaries ?

Another source of concern is the Service Level Agreement (SLA). This is a contract between the provider & the consumer of a service, which dictates allowable downtime, problem resolution guidelines, and provides remediation should either party not meet up to its obligations. In the example above, Google Apps comes without a price-tag, and without an SLA. If they lose your data or are unavailable for an extended period of time, you got exactly what you paid for ! You can expect nothing more from them.

But what if you pay for your SaaS ? A good example is Microsoft's Business Productivity Online Solutions (BPOS) offering. It provides Exchange (e-mail & groupware), SharePoint (document repository on steroids), Office Communications Server (Instant Messaging & Presence Info), and finally LiveMeeting (collaborative real-time meeting space). As a service, it represents the vast majority of the software solutions that Mid-tier & Enterprise clients pay considerably for.

Microsoft recently admitted publicly that they had suffered some serious outages with their BPOS solution. In fact, they even went so far as to apologize for their poor performance ! And rather than scrap the offering as untenable, they re-brand it & call it a new product (Office 365) ! In my mind, that is little more than putting lipstick on a pig !

Companies like IBM and HP will suggest that they can help avoid these problems by putting the Cloud "on the ground", or a hybrid solution. This means the business pays for the cloud services by purchasing a combined hardware & software solutions & installing it in their DataCentre ! Huh ? Did you read that the way _I_ did ? How is that cloud ? The business remains responsible for hardware, software and access to it in their own data-centre. Who are they trying to kid ?

Now that is not to say that ALL Cloud offerings are suspect... I personally have started using more of the SaaS offerings. I like Google Docs, and have used it for a long time. I just make sure I have backup copies of all of my data ! 

But there are other "hybrid" offerings. Two that come immediately to mind (as I use them every day) include:

DropBox - this is a service which "shares" a folder on my local hard-drive. This data in the folder is "synced" regularly to the cloud, where it is kept as a "backup" copy. But what is exciting is that I can sync multiple devices to it. So I can immediately share documents between my iPad and my PC. And my smart-phone. And my wife's MacBook. You see where I am going with this - no matter where the update happens, it gets synced to all the other devices.

EverNote - similarly, EverNote syncs data to & from multiple sources. But its strength comes in the TYPES of data it syncs. I can take photos, web-clippings, text boxes & notes. Then I can tag them for later searching. This is especially exciting to use for researching my blog, as I can assemble tons of disparate data types to use in my blog. The notes can be shared or sent via e-mail. Very powerful indeed.

So don't get me wrong - cloud isn't bad. It just may not really be what you think it is. 

The opinions expressed are purely those of the author. Opinions are like noses - everyone has one, and they are entitled to it !