Is the cloud reliable enough for your business?

[dhilipkumar]

Is the cloud reliable enough for your business?


Big Canvas Inc., was eagerly inviting new customers to subscribe to his company's flagship product, PhotoShare, which lets users swap Apple iPhone photos for free.

PhotoShare and its 50,000 subscribers (now 150,000 strong) had fallen victim to stormy weather in the cloud computing environment: a seven-hour outage on July 20 when Amazon.com Inc.'s S3 cloud service went down -- for the second time in 2008.

Nakajima isn't the only business owner who's been forced to pick up the pieces after a cloud computing outage.


Cloud Pros and Cons
Top perceived benefits of cloud computing:

1. Easy/fast to deploy
2. Pay for only what you use
3. Less in-house staff and lower costs

Top challenges of cloud computing:

1. Security
2. Performance
3. Availability
4. Hard to integrate it with in-house IT
5. Inability to customize it

What customers want from cloud computing:

1. Competitive pricing
2. Performance assurances
3. Understanding of my business and industry
4. Ability to move cloud offerings back on-premises

Source: IDC survey of 244 CIOs

[dhilipkumar]

Peering Into the Cloud

Here are five questions you need answered before moving your business to the cloud:

1. How does my vendor define "good customer service"? Cutting-edge services are key, but you need to find out what a particular vendor considers "good" service and what that service includes, from refund policies to technical assistance.

2. How comfortable am I with my vendor's physical facilities? Part of the due-diligence process includes examining a vendor's facilities and paying attention to the processes around the maintenance of the building, as well as the vendor's equipment maintenance schedule and the number of people working in the building.

3. What types of service interruptions should I be prepared for? Sometimes a vendor will have to shut down a portion of its facility for renovations or equipment upgrades -- activities that can significantly interrupt your cloud computing services. Find out how often a vendor plans to conduct maintenance checks and what kind of advance notice you can expect.

4. How quickly is my vendor growing? You need to know whether your vendor is technically capable of taking on a significant number of new subscribers without it impacting your service levels.

5. What follow-up procedures does my vendor have in place? Outages happen; the important issue is how quickly and effectively your vendor can get to the root of the problem.

[dhilipkumar]

Despite some complaints, in-house IT departments would be hard-pressed to outperform the service levels currently being met by many providers, including Amazon and Google -- occasional outages and all.

"If you were to compare the amount of uptime that the cloud providers are delivering and what's being delivered by your own internal IT teams, you'll find out that the external ones are doing a much better job, mostly because they're under a higher level of scrutiny."

"Cloud computing is reliable enough that if your business can tolerate the occasional outage, you're just starting out, and you don't have a lot to invest , you can take a chance on it," says Info-Tech Research's Sloan. "You might possibly even build a business on it."