Is now the time to embrace the Cloud?

BARRIERS TO CLOUD ADOPTION: The term ‘cloud’ has been around since the 1990s – when telecommunication companies starting using the cloud symbol to indicate an off-premise solution, however the idea of utility based computing has, as least conceptually, existed for several decades.

Cloud is not new. So why have we not seen a widespread adoption of cloud, in particular, public cloud services? There are many different reasons; I’ve chosen to focus on three which I feel have been major factors:
£ Cloud economics
£ Resistance to change
£ Application complexity
Cloud economics
Transition of service to a cloud model represents a significant change to IT and to the business, and significant changes need to be justified financially. The recent hype surrounding cloud computing has coincided with a global recession, which has exacerbated the need to ensure that all projects are supported by a sound business cases. Adoption of cloud computing could directly reduce infrastructure and operating costs. Indirectly, it could increase revenues and improve the profitability of the wider organisation, for example by improving product development and decreasing time to market. However, the production of robust business cases to support a disruptive and often expensive transition to the cloud has proven difficult to achieve. A cloud business case has been and is difficult to create for two reasons; because many of the benefits of the cloud are secondary – such as an improvement in employee productivity as a result of increase mobility; and because many cloud services haven’t had clear pricing structures (take cloud storage as an example – you might know how many GB’s you’ll consume, but do you know how many puts, gets, copies, lists and posts you will do?). The difficulties in quantifying these savings are undoubtedly a barrier to the execution of a cloud strategy.

Resistance to change
We are taught ‘stranger danger’ early in life, and an inherent resistance to change persists in many of us throughout our lives. The execution of a far-reaching cloud strategy contains many risks and the safer option might be to shy away from it. This resistance to change is often founded in a lack of understanding and education, a fact that is not helped by press and marketing material. Even now, ask ten people what ‘cloud’ is and you’ll get ten different answers. The world of cloud can be confusing and the term ‘cloud’ is insufficient in its own right, perhaps even unhelpful.

This resistance to change, borne from a lack of understanding often manifests itself in other areas – in particular concerns around security and performance. A comScore survey showed that 91% of SMEs polled said that security had been ‘positively impacted’ by cloud adoption, conversely 52% of non-cloud using organisations cited security concerns as an inhibitor to adoption. These data suggest that the security fears that prevent cloud adoption are often unfounded.

Application complexity
The final factor that I think has impeded rapid cloud adoption is the complexity of legacy systems. Application development is now often performed on a ‘cloud first’ approach, but many important business services run on complex legacy internal systems with considerable interaction between the various infrastructure and application components. This complexity makes transition to a cloud difficult and expensive. Furthermore, high degrees of integration between application components quickly make application owners and architects opt for the easier route of keeping systems in house. NTT Europe’s research shows that 60% of IT leaders are concerned that cloud providers don’t appreciate the complexity legacy ICT systems – and you aren’t going to use a supplier who doesn’t understand your business.
Time for a revolution?
For the evolution to become a revolution, consumers need to be convinced that a migration to the cloud will benefit all aspects of the organisation. So why might now be the right time to at least reconsider your position on cloud computing?
The cloud is commoditising, and that is good for consumers. The commoditisation of the cloud will make it easier to estimate the expected cost profile and consequently the return on investment and the business case. It will also drive a reduction in prices overall – a trend we have seen repeatedly with Amazon Web Services (AWS). Cloud services offered from tier 3 data centres certified for IL3 are emerging which will help to alleviate the fears of the most conservative CIO and more innovative pay-as-you-go mechanisms allow for a level of flexibility and agility never seen before. Despite the well-publicised outages occasionally experienced by some cloud vendors, technological advancements are constantly improving the quality and availability of cloud based services. For me, one area which I think will have significant impact on cloud adoption is the software defined data centre (SDDC).

When all infrastructure components that make up a solution (including storage, network, load balancing, compute, and security) are virtualised and treated as a container the portability of that application increases dramatically. Applications containerised in such a way can be moved to and between clouds with greater ease than ever before. Keeping security components such as IPS, IDS and firewalls linked to your applications regardless of where they are hosted both enhances and simplifies security. Cloud management software allows consumers to monitor and manage their cloud deployments and if you add in cloud brokerage engine, which can exploit an expanding set of commodity offerings, you’ve got a mature technology set which can open up a range of possibilities for businesses of all sizes.
Finally, as public cloud services become more credible and as some of the key technologies such as Infrastructure as a Service emerge from Gartner’s trough of disillusionment onto the plateau of productivity, so our mindset changes from fear to acceptance. Ultimately, this changing mindset will drive increased cloud adoption. We see this regularly, organisations are no longer thinking “what could go wrong with a cloud model?” they are now asking themselves “how could we benefit from a cloud model?”
Conclusion
Service transition to the cloud should not be done without careful thought, but now – more than ever – the effort spent on crafting a cloud strategy is not wasted. The evolution of service offerings and technologies means that it is more likely that there is a solution in the cloud that will be meet the increasing demands of your users. Not being a prolific user of public or hybrid cloud services could make your organisation uncompetitive as your competitors bring product to the market faster and cheaper than you can.

For more information visit www.glasshouse.com or
email David.Boyd@glasshouse.com