In my last article we discovered the definition of cloud in: Cloud. A Definition. (What on Earth is Cloud Part 1/7) – if you haven’t started at the beginning of the series that’s ok although you may like to flick back if you’re just learning about cloud and what it means to your business.
Today’s article is about What Cloud Is Not. Why do we need to think about what cloud isn’t? Because with such a new concept there is a great deal of confusion in the market. For example, you might have had your data “hosted” in a data center before and there are some companies out there still promoting this model as cloud.
Hosted is Not Cloud
This hosting model might have involved putting a server, or servers into a data center for whatever reason (usually for power, backup and security purposes). Today, many IT providers and IT support specialists are still providing the hosted model and calling it “Cloud” or “Cloud Hosted” whereas the correct terminology is in fact Co-Located or Hosted.
In essence, this definition is wrong. While there are some remarkable benefits of picking up your IT infrastructure and dropping it into a data center in your nearest capital city, it doesn’t provide the same advantages of a distributed cloud model where your data can reside on multiple servers in multiple locations all at once. Whats more, the software you use in a hosted environment isn’t necessarily deemed to be cloud.
SaaS versus Hosted
Think to the last article where I described Internet Banking as a cloud computing application. Now lets take a product such as MYOB. In a hosted model you (or more likely your IT support guy) would load up MYOB on your server, suggest perhaps it might be safer/better/faster/more robust in a data center and away you go. When the software needs upgrading you call your IT guy and he upgrades it. When the software needs to be reinstalled you call again and the software is reinstalled. You see.. the computing model hasn’t changed, your server is just further away.
Now take MYOB SaaS. MYOB have released a version of their software which is maintained, supported and delivered by them. In this model you don’t need to worry about updates, you don’t need to install the software and like most “SaaS” or Software As A Server products you don’t even need to buy it outright but rather, pay a monthly subscription. That there is the key difference between hosting your server and choosing a cloud based application.
Except in circumstances where you might build your own “private cloud” and I’ll get into that in a later article, going cloud should not require you to outlay for large pieces of infrastructure such as servers but rather, choose the services that you need and let somebody else take care of the problems. In a lot of ways, servers and processors and cables and widgets really don’t need to be part of the conversation but rather the key discussion points might be availability, bandwidth, performance and IT support response times.
Although there are some conflicting definitions of Cloud and Hosted, one thing many can agree on now is that the idea of having some or all of your IT managed off your premises is one that is likely to stay. The important thing is to know what model you are buying into and cut to the chase. If you are under the belief that your data is safely “hosted” in a data center only to find out that it was actually transported to Singapore or India without your knowledge.. or perhaps you might be taking comfort that your data is indeed safely distributed amongst many data centers across the world (think Google Mail or Microsoft BPOS) only to discover your data was indeed in a data center hit by a flood or a tornado then you can see why it’s important to make the differentiation early and upfront.
Cloud Is Not Always an “All In” Strategy
Ideally, we make a decision to move our business IT into the Cloud and that’s that right? Of course not. If you recall in my first article in this series I described the slow commoditisation of electricity. Whilst computing is moving at a rapid rate there are still some lagging (and somewhat nagging) issues that will keep many businesses from going all in for some time. In last weeks Last Known Issue (I Know ITs newsletter) I even described how our company was looking for a good HR tool and the one that worked in the end was a very basic application that had to be installed on our server instead of its competing products who were completely cloud based. What did we do? We installed the software on our hosted terminal server in our data center with a whole bunch of other cloud-unfriendly tools and got back on with our lives. It’s not cloud but it works for now and most businesses will have to take a similar approach.
You might decide that your email belongs in the cloud, but your finances don’t. That your files belong in the cloud, but your word processor used to create those files does not. It’s all part of the slow(er) commoditisation of computing.
Now that we’ve covered what Cloud is not, let’s move on to our next topic: Is My Data Safe In the Cloud?
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