cloud computing whitepaper - a non-technical overview

8/9/2019 Cloud Computing Whitepaper - a non-technical overview

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If you’ve read any IT press recently, you will havecome across the term “Cloud Computing” or

“The Cloud”. When it first came to my attention,

around 3 years ago when I discounted adoption

of Cloud Computing for a number of technical

reasons. However, since then there have been

significant improvements in internet

connectivity and reliability, along with other

forms of communications and infrastructure

technologies. Consequently we are now applying

elements of Cloud Computing within ItegraL’s IT

infrastructure.

But how does this impact you as a home user, a

Small / Medium Enterprise (SME) or a large

corporate enterprise? I think there are

similarities in the way each of these might utilise

a cloud-based resource but there are also vastly

contrasting requirements and adoption will vary

significantly between these classes of users, at

least for the next few years.

What is “The Cloud”?

Simply put it is IT services provided over the

internet or other network links. The name arises

from the fact that the services could be providedfrom any location in the world and could be

backed up, secured or supported by other

geographically disperse systems and

infrastructures. So in essence it’s someone else

providing the network, servers, storage, backup

or applications you need from a data-centresomewhere (anywhere) in the world.

Advantages

Many companies providing Cloud services will

advertise features which would not normally be

available to many people or companies at a price

they could afford: equipment stored in a Bank of

England vault, geographically replicated data,

local points of access, capacity on demand.

Some of these options would not be available

from traditional vendors, through purchase and

maintenance, without significant additionalcosts. In the same vein, features that are not

available on entry level systems can be offered

for minimal extra cost when provided as part of

a service; snapshots of data, managed backups,

data profiling.

There are green factors too that can help to sell

Cloud services. These include; locating the data

centre where power is eco-generated, housing

equipment in an energy efficient facility and

power reductions due to consolidation of

equipment.

In addition, if someone else is looking after yourIT, it saves paying for your internal resources to

be trained in the use of the latest technologies.

In some cases it may mean you no longer need

dedicated IT personnel.

It all sounds a bit too good to be true, doesn’t it?

Document Summary

- What is The Cloud?

- Advantages

- Disadvantages

- SME

- Home User

- Enterprise

- Summary

How does it affect you or your business?We look at the very different ways cloud will be adopted by different groups.

J a n u a r y 2 0 , 2 0 1 0

By Robin Watts

CLOUDCOMPUTING



C L O U

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J a n

u a r y 2 0 , 2 0 1 0 Disadvantages

Needless to say, there are

disadvantages, some technical, some

practical and others related to

compliance.

The Cloud relies on accessing remote

services via a network or internet

connection. If connectivity issues

occur, entire services (or access tothose services) will be affected.

Similarly, because of the network

links, response times can be

unacceptable, especially if services

and data are stored in geographically

diverse locations. There are various

ways of combating some of these

issues but locating services or

applications in a cloud environment

should not be undertaken lightly and

requires a fair degree of planning, now

and for the future.When you store your data in the

cloud, you are entirely dependent on

your service provider securing that

data from other users sharing the

same resources as well as from

external attack. And by the very

nature of a cloud, your data could be

stored or replicated to any country in

the world!

There are, of course other advantages

and disadvantages but this paper willnow look at the ways in which

different companies and people are

likely to adopt the Cloud for their IT

services.

As a SME, it is key that you can

provide the necessary IT services to be

able to serve your customers at all

times. However the overhead of

having people employed to maintain

your IT infrastructure can bedisproportionately expensive,

especially if you have a variety of

systems. Therefore, if you can provide

the services at a fixed cost each month

via outsourcing or out-tasking some or

all of those services and save money,

you’re likely to be very interested.

So, as the IT director of a SME you

decide to outsource a number of your

IT and get rid of the data-room with its

few servers and scattered storagearrays. You look around for the best

value solution for your email, your

data-storage and your online

collaboration tools and select 2 or 3

companies. The migration goes

smoothly and data and services are

migrated to the third-parties.

However, later users start to complain

of slow access speeds and

unacceptable responses to their

applications.

If servers providing applications arestored in different locations from the

data which they access, that data has

to traverse the links between them. If

the links aren’t suitable, response

times are degraded. So it clearly pays

to ensure the design is considered

carefully (and tested) before selecting

the service provider.

And consider what happens if internet

access dies or the connections you are

dependent on suddenly get dug up by

the workmen in the road outside?Suddenly everyone in the office can no

longer access those services. One

option is to spend some of the money

you have saved on providing an

alternative geographical internet link,

but again, the start up costs for such a

solution, not to mention the rental

charges can prove to be very

expensive. Fortunately, nowadays,

with 3G data speeds, employees have

alternatives and one or a number of

3G links could be aggregated toprovide access for crucial personnel,

departments or services within the

office. Most of the technical

workarounds are there, they just need

to be carefully considered and

eventualities assessed for risk of

occurrence versus the cost of them

occurring.

The current economic climate, where

it will be hard to justify capital

expenditure, will encourage the SME

market to look at alternatives to

hosting their own IT. Spiraling costs of

rental, power and DR provisioning will

certainly encourage many to do more

than dip a toe in the water. As

household names continue to offer

more Cloud services, many SMEs will

bigrate large sections of IT into the

cloud. Wherever it may be.

Consider a home user, perhaps IT

literate to a point where they have

setup a WIFI network, attached a NAS

device upon which they store some

films, music and photos which they

play through a media player. Their

primary concerns are likely to be

internet access (for email, games,

online banking and purchases) and

data retention of precious photos,

films and music, downloaded or

converted. Maybe they store things on

their main computer or laptop and

back them up to their NAS, or maybe

they access everything from their NAS

to allow everyone in the house to see

the same files. Either way, they will

likely only have copies of their key files

in the house (or at best the house and

garage). This certainly doesn’t protect

from data loss in the event of a fire or

a burglary. So they start to look for

other ways to protect their data.

The Cloud is a superb way for home

users to backup data and access

industry standard applications on a

Software as a Service (SaaS) basis,

rather than the alternative of paying

license fees and upgrade costs for

each item of software purchased. It

provides great flexibility for sharing

information with friends and wider

family members around the world.

However, care should be taken

SMECloud computing can bring advantages and

disadvantages. Controlling the contract

negotiations is key to service delivery.

Small-Medium Enterprises

Home Users



C L O U

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J a n

u a r y 2 0 , 2 0 1 0

regarding what information is stored bearing

in mind that home user-designed solutions

will not be as robust as are business offerings

in terms of security or maintenance features.

Similarly, it can be risky to place total

dependence on remote applications as

undoubtedly some of the companies offering

Cloud services will fail. Application access, or

worse, data may be lost. Even Google Apps

has outages despite their vast array of

business continuity planning.

The Enterprise Company will approach cloud

in a very different manner from a SME or

home user. They have already paid huge

sums for data-centres, infrastructure and

equipment as well as training in-house

personnel to operate their systems

efficiently. Additionally, the idea of passing

over the company data and applications to a

third-party, particularly some of their more

sensitive data or higher revenue-earning

applications will be difficult to sell to the

board.

Over the next few years a hybrid model is

likely to emerge in the Enterprise Company

where certain low grade, low risk services are

migrated to a Cloud model. Other services

will be moved to a “virtual Cloud” level. This

will allow applications to be designed “Cloud-ready” and for operating principles to be

tested and proven, ready for migration to an

external Cloud services provider.

Over the last 20 years a typical approach to

data-centres for an Enterprise Company has

been to have a pair of data-centres, one

operating in primary mode and the second

for fail-over. The primary data-centre has

multiple links and good power, cooling and

security provisions with a high level of

resilience making total loss of service from

this facility a rare occurrence. To secure

against the rare occasion of complete failures

the Enterprise Company typically has a

second data-centre, in a geographically

diverse location with a subset of services

ready to be switched to primary in the event

of a catastrophe.

With the advent of modern virtualisation and

resilient solutions, the line between data-

centres being primary and secondary has

blurred with many Enterprise Companies now

running two live data-centres for better

efficiency and to reduce the impact of losingone. VMWare and similar server virtualisation

technologies have helped to accelerate this

model, making good use of storage and

networking resilience, where the technology

is mature and reliable.

The down-side of this model is that

“...the idea of passing over control of the company dataand applications to a third-par-

ty, particularly some of themore sensitive data ...will bedifficult to sell to the board.”

Home Users

Cloud computing

allows access toapplications and

stored data from

almost anywhere,

however you access

the net, providing

unprecedented

access options

Enterprise Companies



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J a n

u a r y 2 0 , 2 0 1 0 restricting a company to only 2 large

data-centres still constrains the

locations of offices, ease of technology

refresh or site migrations and the ability

to swiftly move IT resources to take

advantage of tax, cost or carbon-

offsetting benefits. To address these

issues, the future for the Enterprise is

likely to be one where an internal cloudfacility, operates over a number of

global data-centres and where the loss

of a centre is no longer a major incident

but merely an inconvenience for the

support personnel. Customers and

internal staff might not even notice that

service provision has switched from one

location to another, except perhaps

through marginally longer response

times. This model also enables sections

of the cloud to be easily and swiftly

migrated to cost-beneficial locations,either Enterprise owned or outsourced.

Of course, this is not to say Enterprise

Customers will not adopt some external

cloud services. Services that can handle

unpredictable peaks of demand and

generic services such as web-front end

applications are key targets where scale

can generate savings or where services

only need to be paid for on occasion. It

does not make sense for an Enterprise

to run year round an infrastructure to

support peak demand for say Christmas

and New Year. A key driver for

migrating services to the cloud will likely

be to reduce headcount. Running banks

of web-front-end servers and

maintaining patch levels and firewalls

can be an expensive overhead when

resources to deliver the same service at

a much lower cost could be delivered

from elsewhere in the world.

While reduction in headcount will be a

factor in the Enterprise migration of

services to external clouds, Carbon

trading will likely have an even bigger

impact in the shift of services from the

Enterprise to the Cloud. Companies will

look to migrate IT services to more

efficient data-centres, particularly to

locations where power is generated in a

more environmentally acceptable way,

using for example renewable energy

sources. Migration of key services will

however be limited until auditors and

lawyers can be satisfied that security,

litigation and accountability can be

apportioned in the event of a failure, or

worse, data loss or corruption, or

unauthorised access. Until then, expect

the Enterprise to setup their own Clouds

for all apart from mundane services. In

the meantime, Cloud providers will be

working hard to demonstrate that they

have answers to these issues and have

developed standards that allow the

Enterprise to migrate with a level of

confidence that their services and data

will be secure, measurable and flexible.

Home users are pretty much using the cloud already with applications like Facebook, MySpace, Flickr and the range of

Google applications have already persuaded most users of these services to store information there, sometimes exclusively.

People who have grown up with broadband and 3G access have few qualms about this; the reliability of the applications and

services is all but proven and multiple access options allow fallback in the event of one failing. Users should be very careful

about trusting some of the less well-known Cloud providers as some of these will fail over the next few years leaving users

stranded unless they have taken precautions.

Small to Medium Enterprises will increasingly look to control and reduce costs. The current economic climate will encourage

them to look at Cloud services as the access to large capital expenditure is harder to justify. Vendors’ options to force users

to upgrade by hiking maintenance and support charges could backfire as the SMEs look to specific service providers to

deliver storage and servers. As SMEs look to service providers, they’ll soon discover that many of these offer features

previously outside of their price-range and customer service levels previously only available to large Enterprises. There will

be technical challenges to be faced but organizations who can advise with authority will be well placed to lead the SME into

the Cloud.

Enterprise customers will start migrating lower-end services to the cloud, and possibly look at service providers for their

development over the next 2-3 years. After that, as security and access standards start to emerge, Saas type applications

will become far more mainstream in large companies. Within 3-5 years, it’s likely some of these Enterprise customers, the

ones with more flexibility and potentially older infrastructures will begin to adopt Platform as a Service offerings from

proven Cloud service providers, some of which will certainly be the large vendors around today. Carbon offsetting will

increasingly push companies to look at greener ways of delivering services and this will be far easier for them to adopt using

infrastructure built by specialist providers than it will be for them to try and keep pace on their own.

In Summary

The days of visiting the data-

centre to fix a problem are here

for a little while longer.

cloud computing whitepaper - a non-technical overview

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