Five cloud computing myths exploded

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Cath Everett ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 02 Feb 2009 10:55 GMT

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Myth 4: Flick a switch and your IT shifts to the cloud

The reason why cloud services are comparatively cheap is they are not customised for individual clients, which allows providers to take advantage of economies of scale to reduce costs. While this situation may change as the market becomes more sophisticated, organisations will experience problems finding bespoke or vertical market-specific services at the moment.

Another challenge is that many IT departments still have some way to go in moving to an IT services-based approach themselves or towards simplifying their infrastructure to such an extent that elements can be outsourced to cloud providers in a straightforward fashion.

In a storage context, for example, Jon Collins, service director at consultancy Freeform Dynamics, explains that organisations have been struggling to introduce the concept of tiered infrastructure for years, which is the principle behind information lifecycle management.

The problem is that too few firms have worked out "which data should go where from a business point of view". This failing means moving everything to the cloud would not provide any real benefits as the fundamentals have not been sorted out. It would merely "create a new set of network dependencies because the data is no longer in the same datacentre", Collins says.

He adds that such a move would, moreover, be a "massive business risk" for any beyond the smallest of organisations because such services are "untested, unready, overhyped and don't come with any guarantees" or service-level agreements.

Another concern is security. While vendors will tell you that they have the resources to make their datacentres more secure than you ever could and that resilience is better because data is distributed and backed up in geographically dispersed locations, that is not entirely the point.

For some organisations, including those in the public sector, distributing data around the world can cause problems for risk management and regulatory compliance. Some enterprises may also have an issue with sharing the same equipment with rivals, even if application instances are quite separate.

Other risks to be managed include sorting out intellectual-property rights, establishing adequate security controls, including appropriate staff-vetting procedures, and working out what happens if suppliers go out of business.

Go to section: Myth 1: Cloud equals SaaS, grid and utility computing Myth 2: Cloud computing will take over the world Myth 3: You can use competing cloud services Myth 4: Flick a switch and your IT shifts to the cloud Myth 5: Switching cloud vendors is easy

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