Campbell: issues with cloud computing are far from light

Skepticism over cloud computing

Donald Campbell

Cloud computing appears to be the next wave… Skepticism over cloud computing

Donald Campbell

Cloud computing appears to be the next wave of computer technology to sweep the corporate world.

This is rather startling because cloud computing represents a complete 180 on the computing paradigms that have, until recently, dominated corporate IT spending.

Until now, corporations have bought and maintained their own server islands, complete with individually licensed software for writing documents and creating spreadsheets, e-mails, data storage and software development.

Cloud computing appears to offer a better solution — have a larger company like Google, Amazon or Microsoft provide the same software solutions as an Internet service for a fee.

It seems reasonable. After all, it costs money and requires a significant amount of manpower for a company to successfully maintain a respectable amount of server capacity.

All is not quite right in the world of cloud computing, however.

As the implementation of cloud computing and its threats to dominate become more apparent, companies are beginning to distrust the move toward the cloud.

A recent report published on the online information technology journal CIO noted that the switch to cloud computing might not be as advantageous as companies once thought.

First off, the removal of complete control over IT infrastructure can be somewhat worrisome for companies.

The argument is that this removal will make things cheaper for the company because the company need not deal with the costly and mundane tasks of server ownership, including repairs, power and cooling — might be overstated.

The study found that switching from a test company’s own server farm to a cloud run by Amazon would increase operating costs by 144 percent.

The removal of control over a server farm might also cause disconcerting reliability concerns.

Recently, Google’s Gmail service denied access to millions of customers for a period of time. Although Gmail is a free service, not a paid cloud computing service, the outage made companies skeptical toward laying all of their critical IT infrastructure in the hands of a shadowy, external cloud.

ComputerWorld magazine recently published a report online describing the concerns Google received for its recent outages.

Google maintains that its cloud style of online e-mail offerings for corporations is more reliable than the e-mail services a company could easily set up with its own servers, but companies now take Google’s assurances with an ever-burgeoning grain of salt.

As an apparent reinforcement of these reservations, the CIO report said cloud computing companies cannot provide services as efficiently as companies could maintain services on-site because of the overhead involved in providing cloud services to clients,

But what alternatives are there to cloud computing?

Computing for large corporations might not be able to stagnate, because the cost of running individual machines will surely rise.

As the complexity of required software also increases, it is reasonable to think that the overhead required to maintain large corporations using multiple software packages would also increase.

Companies might find solace in backing away from cloud computing and returning to previous trends in virtualization.

If one server device could easily run multiple operating systems and handle multiple infrastructure applications, further optimization might not be required.

Further concerns about cloud computing could be raised over security issues.

Companies with extremely sensitive information can compartmentalize information to a certain extent by disconnecting certain machines from networks in the outside world.

The cloud inherently implies storage, transfer and manipulation of business data in the outside world.

As cloud computing looms greater in the computing horizon, companies might become increasingly skeptical of the new technology for security and safety reasons.

link