Enterprise applications Toolkit

Five cloud computing myths exploded

Cath Everett ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 02 Feb 2009 10:55 GMT

Myth 3: You can use competing cloud services

The market for cloud services is still only in its infancy, and adoption has consisted of limited or departmental trials. One of the inhibitors to further uptake is the piecemeal nature of the provider market.

Jonathan Yarmis of AMR Research says whatever cloud purists may claim: "For users looking at this stuff today, the last thing they want is to deal with 23 vendors each providing a small portion of the cloud and then being left to integrate everything,"

Apart from the likely management and support headaches such an approach would entail, the problem is that providers may, for example, use a range of back-end databases that "end up with weird burdens when you put them together". Another issue is that back-end applications may be upgraded at different times, leading to system and device incompatibilities. Therefore, Yarmis says: "People want one head on a plate."

However, as the market matures, it is likely that such challenges will sort themselves out. On the one hand, as vendor consolidation inevitably takes place, offerings will broaden out and become less niche. On the other, large service providers such as IBM are likely to spot the advantage of becoming aggregators for their own and third-party services, sorting out many of the integration and management issues in the process.