Maybe the Cloud IS useful after all...

This article helped the penny drop for me regarding the Cloud. Sure I've read the Azure brochures and seen the LotusLive demos and talked to the assorted Googlers but until now I've never felt comfortable recommending the product to my customers. The fascinating fact is that this article has nothing to do with the Cloud - it's all about the 'fallacy' of running IT as a business.

I'll let you read the article at your leisure but I'll sum it up by saying that it recommends that IT is best seen as a fellow Business Unit within an organization rather than simply as a supplier of charge-back services. One example is the difficulty of 'selling' the company standard laptop to a business unit for $800 when they can get an equivalent-spec laptop from the local YumCha computer shop website for one third the price. Sure you can talk of the benefits of a common hardware platform and the need to implement a standard anti-virus and security model through the company but that don't mean nuttin' to the non-IT manager who thinks you're ripping him off. On the other hand, we all put up with a deluge of personally inconvenient requirements from those pen-pushers in HR or Finance because we see them as essential to the operation of the business. See the difference? If IT is considered a separate business then it will be measured against all of the other separate businesses and must lose the inevitable Price/Benefit war as well as having its wetware off-shored to where-ever is cheapest. However if IT is seen as an internal facilitator who assists in achieving the corporate organizational goals, then the dollars become less relevant.

So what does this have to do with the Cloud?

I must admit that I've been seeing the Cloud as the thin edge of an outsourcing wedge which would lead to the dumbing down of IT as it was forced to abandon user requirements to meet the packaged services provided by the vendors. However if your IT department is a Business PARTNER with the other units of the company, then it can pick and choose what aspects of the Cloud work best for the organizational IT strategy rather than the only issue being that its internal chargeback costs are more expensive than the Cloud environment.

I still believe there will be Blood on the Floor when the Cloud hits its first major security breach, but perhaps moving away from the 'IT as a Cost Center' mindset will make the Cloud a more attractive proposition.
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Strike Two! Cloud Computing loses more customer data

Last month I highlighted an incident where users lost their data which had been hosted by a Microsoft subsidiary. Now a similar problem has hit Palm OS devices and once more the hosting provider is 'working' with users to assist in recovering their data.

The way I read it, the data is gone forever but the loss to each individual user is far below the entry cost for a lawsuit so the maximum downside for Palm etc. is a PR hit for a couple of weeks then back to business as usual. One day a hosting provider will lose a lawyer's data and then it'll be pass the popcorn while we watch the customers fighting the PR flacks with lawsuits at dawn.

If anyone wants to tell me that the Palm and Danger scenarios weren't technically Cloud Computing then perhaps you can preface your remarks by telling me the difference from a customer's point of view... "I gave you my data and now it's gone. Everything else is irrelevant."
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The hidden cost of Cloud Computing

There are real advantages in Cloud Computing but this is not one of them:

TBST claimed its normal monthly communications bill was about $320 but it was billed for almost $3000 during a period when the network was needlessly backing up several gigabytes of data daily to synchronise the iDisk data using Apple's MobileMe. This is a subscription service for so-called "cloud computing" where users pay to store data on what is referred to in PowerPoint-speak as the "internet cloud".

If you're going to advise your customers to put their data into the cloud then I suggest you help them calculate the new bandwidth costs before they do the migration. If you don't, then you might find out that their budget allocation for software consulting for the next few quarters gets diverted to paying the phone bill.
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Microsoft DID warn you...

Naming their subsidiary 'Danger' was only a subtle hint, but the hint was there.

My last post highlighted the problem of maintaining a secure Cloud Computing environment in the face of easily guessed login names and general password apathy. Now Microsoft has had to admit that their cloud may not be as resilient as they hoped it was. One of their subsidiaries (aptly named 'Danger') has lost customer data. Note that this data is not just misplaced or waiting for a restore of backup tapes - it is no more, it has ceased to be, it has expired and gone on to meet its maker. It is ex-data.

If you were an IT Manager and you had just 'lost' some data, imagine explaining that situation to your boss. What are your chances of escaping this situation with just a formal apology and an offer to forgo your bonus for the quarter? Probably quite small, but I'm betting that's exactly what Microsoft/Danger will offer. A snail-mailed letter on good quality paper printed where-ever its cheapest and an offer of an additional three months service for free. But first you must manually re-enter all of your data into our system...

I was also interested to read of a potential problem where lost data can be retrieved, but because of a massive server farm breakdown (terrorist attack?) there is insufficient bandwidth to restore all of the data in a timely manner.

Am I the only one worried about this? Sometimes I feel like Private James Frazer from Dad's Army with his oft-repeated observation of "We're dooooomed". I see many advantages in Cloud Computing, but the whole thing is moving too fast and aiming too high for my liking. My advice? Make haste slowly with the cloud and keep on-site backups of everything.
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Arguments against Cloud Computing

Google have been pushing Cloud Computing it for a while but I shrugged off their initial enthusiasm because when all you have is a website then everything looks like a web application. Then Microsoft jumped on the bandwagon but I figure they'll jump on any new idea just in case it spawns a serious competitor and they miss the chance to kill the opposition before it grows bigger than they are. Now IBM has joined the party by selling LotusLive so it seems that all Three Emperors have New Clothes made from the same cloth. On my grumpy days all of this Cloud Computing stuff just seems to be just a repackaging of Domino Hosting from the 1990's - ie a useful product but not the answer to everything.

So it's reassuring for me to read this post from Cory Doctorow who's more cynical than I am about the whole idea.

...the main attraction of the cloud to investors and entrepreneurs is the idea of making money from you, on a recurring, perpetual basis, for something you currently get for a flat rate or for free without having to give up the money or privacy that cloud companies hope to leverage into fortunes.

There are some interesting comments following his blog post but I did notice that a significant number of the pro-Cloud comments were made by people who were selling Cloud-related services.
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Telstra follows Google into the Black Hole

Being Australia's largest provider of telecommunication services didn't stop Telstra from sharing an hour's worth of unscheduled network downtime today.

Telstra's national internet network went down for an hour today, the company says.

The outage is understood to have affected all Telstra home and businesses broadband and mobile internet customers nationwide.

All services were restored by about 8.50am, a Telstra spokesman said.

The company formed a major incident response team to investigate the outage. It's not yet known what caused it.

So all of those companies using Google Apps had a somewhat lengthy coffee break while companies running internal Domino servers just kept on running. I think the hardest part of running your company on Google Apps would be when your IT person tells you (quite truthfully) that there is nothing they can do except wait for someone else to fix the problem.
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Another GMail outage...

Google had two separate outages this week.

One was a small outage on Monday that wiped out email to only a "small subset" of users.

Tuesday afternoon's outage affected "a majority" of Gmail users and lasted about an hour and 45 minutes until the problem was fixed, the company said.

Clinical reports of Google email outages don't reveal the angst of the businesses that suffer loss of service. When it's your own servers that are down you can get rapid status updates from your IT staff and decide whether to invest in additional system redundancy. When it's all in the cloud then all you can do is twiddle your thumbs and wait.

The same questions about system uptime apply to the Microsoft and Lotus offerings in this area. I'm not an expert on the cloud but it all seems terribly fragile to me.
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Foundations and Cloud Computing

According to this story Lotus Foundations is coming soon to a cumulonimbus near you...

In September, Vietnam Technology and Telecommunications Joint Stock Company (VNTT) signed a contract with IBM to build a cloud computing environment using IBM software, services and hardware. IBM will build a cloud computing center using IBM System x, BladeCenter and System Storage managed by IBM Blue Cloud technologies. In addition to data center services, VNTT will provide its customers with cloud-based collaboration services such as email on Lotus Domino, intranet service on WebSphere Portal Express and company server on Lotus Foundations, managed by Tivoli software.
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