Cloud Computing Definitions and Solutions

• What is cloud computing?
• What are the different types of cloud computing?
• Why would I want cloud computing?
• What are the drawbacks of cloud computing?
• What to look for from cloud computing providers
• Snapshot: Pros, Cons, Risks

Why would I want cloud computing?

According to critics, there are nearly as many reasons not to want cloud computing as there are reasons to use it.

The arguments for cloud computing are simple: get sophisticated data-center services on demand, in only the amount you need and can pay for, at service levels you set with the vendor, with capabilities you can add or subtract at will.

However, if someone else owns the computer infrastructure you rely on, you don't have the kind of control over your data and the performance of your applications that you may need, not to mention the ability to audit or change the processes and policies under which even authorized users must work.

A slew of software vendors are rushing into the market to fill this gap with management tools, but that set of products remains quite young.

Complying with HIPAA, Sarbox and other federal regulations — and, more importantly, demonstrating to auditors that you have — is extremely difficult right now with regards to cloud, according to Chris Wolf, virtualization and infrastructure analyst at The Burton Group.

"When you're talking about virtualization, at least there's some commonality in the platform, the hypervisor you're using, if not in the hardware behind it," Wolf says. "Cloud is not a one-size-fits-all solution. You have various flavors of SAAS, Amazon's EC2 and other infrastructure services that are all different in how they treat data at rest [in storage] and in motion [when it's being used in applications or communications]. That's a big problem."

Cloud customers risk losing data by having it locked into proprietary formats, may lose control over data because tools to see who's using it or who can view it as it moves across the network are inadequate, or may lose confidence in it because they don't know when data has been compromised or how, Wolf says.

What are the drawbacks of cloud computing?

Clouds pose more than just legal problems; there are technical ones, too, according to Bob Laliberte, analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group.

"We say about virtualization that it's hard to manage an environment where your applications are playing hide and seek and your hardware is lying to you," Laliberte says. "It's even more with clouds. You're having to try to manage someone else's hardware that's lying to you."

There is no single "cloud" involved in cloud computing, Laliberte says. All the SaaS and infrastructure-services providers use different technology and different standards, meaning every vendor relationship will be different. You can't just tool up one application or business process for "the cloud" and be ready to go.

You also can't just move applications to the cloud and expect them to run, even with the best virtualization technology, according to James Staten, data-center analyst for Forrester Research.

To move any significant corporate processing into a cloud environment requires at least the same amount of work IT would have to do to move the same workload from its existing servers to new virtual or physical servers, including reconfiguring connections to network and storage resources, Wolf says.

Keeping track of what happens after the workloads move often means using a completely different set of management applications that integrate imperfectly, if at all, with a company's existing management applications, Laliberte says. IBM, HP, BMC and other data-center systems-management vendors are adding cloud-management functions as quickly as possible in order to try to appeal to customers who have never dealt with them before, Laliberte says.

"A lot of CIOs are interested in internal clouds, but they're leery of the performance issues and security inherent in the cloud environment," he says.

Virtualization leader VMware is also leaping into clouds, basing much of its technology strategy on the idea that companies should be able to virtualize all their IT assets into "internal clouds" that will interoperate seamlessly with external clouds also based on VMware virtualization software.

Both that capability and customers' willingness to go along with it are still in question, Wolf and Laliberte agree.

The best use of clouds would be to be able to move specific workloads from internal servers to a cloud provider when you expect a spike in demand, take advantage of the cloud provider's additional capacity, move it back when the rush is over and pay only for the resources you used, Staten says.

"We're a long way from being able to do that," Staten says. (See Busting the Nine Myths of Cloud Computing).

CIOs on the leading edge of cloud adoption say using an external cloud can make sense, but that metrics and strict controls are even more important in a cloud environment than in a normal internal IT environment, specifically because there are so few controls inherent in cloud-computing relationships. They recommend this checklist of issues to go through before deciding whether and why to use cloud services, which to use, and how. Though the intent of cloud computing is simple, the impact and mechanisms for delivery are often far more complex.

"There's a lot more to it than people often admit," Staten says.

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