There has been much furore of late about Cloud Computing, the focus becoming so intense that we are well into Emperor’s New Clothes syndrome, as organisations leap towards something they think ‘have to have’ without necessarily understanding ‘it’ or the consequences. Whilst there are plenty of examples of organisations that have benefitted from off-loading their IT infrastructure, the fledgling public cloud industry has unsurprisingly done little to highlight the downsides.
Let’s take a step back for a moment and, instead of starting with technology, look at people and their need to access information. For most organisations, people and information are their primary assets. Without unfettered access between those assets the organisation will lack efficiency and flexibility and may even grind to a halt. We have already seen the product of a lack of strategic architectural planning in large organisations where islands of information are not joined to provide a single 360 degree view of the customer. The customer suffers. In organisations with multiple services and scenarios where multiple organisations have to collaborate around the delivery of a service, joining up information from multiple disparate systems becomes a day to day necessity. In these cases, it would be right to ask a few basic questions before unhitching my corporate data centre. I had better be very sure that:
- the available cloud-based applications are the right choice for my business
- I have access to my data without being bound by restrictive licence terms and conditions
- I am legally permitted to offload the storage of sensitive information to a third party
- I am happy that a third party has control over one of my primary assets
- my data is not locked away inside an application over whose development path I have no control
- I can securely share my data with people, other organisations, and other applications
- I can respond rapidly to changing business needs without having to buy an expensive add-on to a monolithic application every time my process needs to change
- I can push and pull information as quickly as I need to
- I don’t have to pay an application licence fee just to access my data
- all of my data is in one place and is structured in a way that is flexible enough to deal with network outages and any number of changes to my business processes that might be required… forever
The above list is far from exhaustive but it does serve to demonstrate that unless you are the manufacturer of a single widget and you’ll never have to deal with anything more complex than selling and producing your single widget, you might want to look at the alternatives to hosting in a public cloud. Certainly, there are many advantages of cloud computing that can be brought into your data centre to deliver your own, very much more flexible private cloud. In a private cloud, you can mitigate the lack of flexibility by mixing old with new. Not everything has to be in your cloud. The important point being that you have control.
We’ve done some informal research of our own on the new wave of public cloud offerings. Without a doubt, there are some stunningly talented and innovative technologists out there but, in our experience, very few of them are customer-focussed in a way that makes them accountable. Even fewer can begin to understand the culture, the processes, or the information needs of their larger customers. They are focussed on rapid growth. So, as with internet hosting companies a decade ago, if you’re unhappy, they will only bend so far before concluding that ‘there’ll be another customer along in a moment’.
Lastly, for large, complex organisations, particularly the public sector, there is an even more fundamental question with which to conjure. Public cloud computing exists to make money. With some providers making up to 30-40% margin, why would you want to sell off the family silver of shared services when a public sector owned private cloud, delivered on a public sector network would bring national savings of £billions? We’re back to building a Strategic IT Framework that focuses on people again…
David Gale – March 2011
CEO
SITFO.org
Well said. I agree with everything you have said. IT people seem to love the cloud whereas the man in the street is not quite so enamoured with it. There are still companies that believe rich applications have a future. My company is one of them.
Cheers – Steve
One of my major concerns is that the public cloud is not conducive to integrating legacy line of business applications. Far better to deliver that in your own data centre, whether it be private cloud or not. Another point worth noting is that the response times from many public cloud-based applications in 2011 wouldn’t have been considered acceptable for a hard-wired line of business application in 1991. Twenty years on and we seem to be going backwards. Lastly, public cloud applications may be dressed up as being flexible in business terms but the reality for most complex businesses is that they can be horribly inflexible and may even stifle, rather than promote, business growth.
This posted by Denarius at http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/1/2011/05/28/cloud_third_industrial_revolution/#c_1077549
Sunday 29th May 2011 15:09 GMT
Relic applications ? Nope. My custom odd app, never!
And cloud allows multiple ancient highly customised mission critical apps running on old and odd backend databases or hardware to run how? Oh, only M$ or basic *nix stuff. Yeah right, really useful for big enterprises.
Another idiot buzzword salesweasel campaign for chronically gullible PHBs. Great for sales weasels though. Much to promise, since they never have to deliver. Lots of potential for bean counters to sack staff, since bean counters are never crucified for stuffing up an organisation. Bigger performance bonuses for the board and senior suits because their pay has no connection to a company surviving more than two years after their looting. One could argue that incompetence is mandatory at that level, judging by the last 3 years of examples.
The loss of control also means loss of responsibility. Perfect for the cowards, weaklings and process droids that masquerade as business people.
This posted by David Gale on Monday 30th May 2011 08:30 GMT
The Idiots’ Guide to Enterprise Architecture
Yes, there may be small companies and privately owned manufacturers of a single widget for whom a public cloud solution might be beneficial. In a complex enterprise, the reality is very different.
There are many short-term, accountancy and bonus-driven CEOs and FDs that will look at the bottom line without understanding the loss of flexibility in preventing their enterprises from integrating multiple, disparate data sources and systems, and killing off any opportunity to independently manipulate and manage business processes without having to go cap in hand to a cloud-based ERP supplier. For most large organisations, what the cloud delivers in terms of capital efficiency, it more than takes away in loss of response and flexibility to changing business needs.
For the most part, the companies that go to public cloud will do so with little in the way of strategic, architectural governance over IT. In the long term, that may well cost them a competitive advantage.