Enterprise applications Toolkit

Five cloud computing myths exploded

Cath Everett ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 02 Feb 2009 10:55 GMT

Myth 5: Switching cloud vendors is easy

Although technically there are ways of switching data between one cloud provider and another, few vendors have come up with formalised procedures or guarantees about how they will do it, which is a concern if customers decide a given service is not right for them.

Another challenge, however, is simply the amount of traffic the internet can handle, as evidenced by complaints from ISPs about the amount of bandwidth being consumed by the BBC's iPlayer video service.

"The internet is not an infinite resource so as soon as you want to do a big movement of data, things get very sticky. Just moving a couple of gigabytes onto a USB stick can take 10 minutes, but doing it over the internet will take much longer even with a high-bandwidth connection," Jon Collins of Freeform Dynamics says.

As a result, he points out, one cloud provider offering an archiving service is forced to load storage disks onto trucks and aircraft rather than transfer data online because there is simply not enough capacity to do so. But this scenario also raises the question of whether there is sufficient bandwidth to cope at the moment with a large number of organisations accessing IT services over the internet.

Collins thinks not. "Realistically, very few organisations would bet their entire company on the web and are unlikely to do so in the next 10 years," he concludes.