I’m watching several clients as they move, or consider moving, parts of their IT infrastructure to the cloud. Some of their issues have really given me pause.
What is “the cloud” anyway? It’s several things, among others a currently-hot catchphrase in IT. It can be software as a service (SaaS), for instance using Gmail for email and Google’s Postini for spam filtering. These particular things are highly appropriate for running over the Internet; if the Internet’s down you’re not getting email anyway, right?
Or it can be platform as a service (PaaS), where you’re moving not just an application to the cloud, but using the cloud as your whole IT and application platform. Think of Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud: you pick your favorite OS and instantiate a virtual machine on top of Amazon’s computing resources. I can see one big advantage: letting Amazon worry about power and cooling and bandwidth and hardware. And if my personal Internet connection is down, no big deal: Amazon is still running my server.
Or we might mean Infrastructure as a Service, where my whole IT shenanigan moves to the cloud: virtualized servers, virtual desktops, outsourced support; voila! No IT department! Ha ha ha. As if. There’s a good idea here, but any organization that goes this route had better have at least one sharp IT-knowledgeable person on staff, or getting your value out of this transformation is going to be a tough proposition.
Is any of this really new? No: but relying on the Internet to do it is. Which will bring me, in our next installment, to the things you should really be worrying about if you’re migrating to the cloud.