The Technology Life

← Cloud Computing Inquiries at Gartner

Cloud Computing: Through a Glass, Darkly

February 9th, 2010 · 5 Comments

Do cloud computing providers understand customer requirements? Do customers understand their requirements? No and no, and this is a problem.

Today, most cloud computing providers offer one-size-fits-all services – with few options or service level alternatives. As the market matures, there will be thousands of providers, each trying to differentiate by focusing on specific market needs, and offering service level alternatives and options to attract specific types of customers.

This sounds great, except service providers don’t really know what options the market needs, and perhaps more importantly, potential customers don’t always understand their service level requirements.

Service providers will figure this out by experimenting, and making adjustments as they go. Some of these adjustments will be hard and expensive to make (and retrofit). Some providers will simply fail. The customers will figure this all out by getting burned.

No doubt, there are many service needs that can be fulfilled just fine by one-size-fits-all services – go for it. But the next stage of cloud computing use – more varied, business-critical services – will require something more.

A key to success for cloud computing is getting the interface right, and getting the service requirements right. The interface defines the service offering in detail for the customer, and the service options link directly to automation behind the interface. Building this automation isn’t easy – and many providers will focus on specific market needs rather then create a huge array of options. If success requires new options, that means new automation, and that might require fundamental architecture changes. Providers who guess right on market requirements before they build their service offering will have a definite advantage over those who need to make a (perhaps costly) mid-course correction.

Enterprise IT organizations building private cloud services will have a different issue. Do they limit their offerings to their service catalog alone, or do they allow exceptions and special requests – which will add overhead and cost? A key to their success is spending time early in the design process understanding current and future enterprise requirements, and ensuring their architecture gives them enough flexibility to adjust as needed. Bottom line – understand your customer and their service needs, first!

But the real danger is to cloud computing customers – especially those bypassing enterprise IT to use an apparently attractive cloud service. In most cases, they’re used to an enterprise IT provider who reacts to custom requests and changes in requirements. There is someone to talk to. There are often implicit “service level” requirements that enterprise IT handles without the customer even knowing – like disaster recovery, security, regulatory compliance, availability, legal requirements/risk. Enterprise IT often over-provisions services for users – giving them more than they asked for. Don’t expect that from a cloud service provider. Failure to understand your own requirements might lead you to choose the wrong provider, increase your costs, or any number of scarier problems. Bottom line, fully understand your service level needs before you take the leap.

Even if enterprises don’t expect to use many cloud services for years, now is the time to start re-shaping the relationship between IT and the business. Build rich, detailed service level agreements. Make explicit those things that are provided implicitly. Prepare for the time when external cloud service providers will be a viable choice. A center of competency for cloudsourcing within the enterprise (or outside service broker help) is a good idea.

Thanks to Doug Savage for allowing me to use his excellent cartoon – if you’ve got a minute, take a look at his site – very funny stuff!

Share:

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

Tags: Cloud

5 responses so far ↓

• 1 uberVU - social comments // Feb 10, 2010 at 8:54 am

  Social comments and analytics for this post…

  This post was mentioned on Twitter by ToshioMatsudaE: [Gartner] Cloud Computing: Through a Glass, Darkly: Do cloud computing providers understand customer requirements?… http://bit.ly/90D3hl…

• 2 Martin Reti // Feb 11, 2010 at 11:44 am

  congrats! This is a fine and clear summation of the various hinderances cloud computing has to overcome in the business area, especially for enterprise customers (MNCs).
  Those customers will demand the services they know from their traditional outsourcing partners or internal IT departments.
  An original one size fits all cloud approach won´t help those customers – in most cases. I wonder how much will be left of this original cloud features when assigned to real business (perhaps business critical) purposes.
  I assume providers have to combine traditional outsourcing achievements and the opportunities of the cloud era to find an adequate fusion of both worlds that fits to enterprise customers´ demands.

• 3 Martin Reti // Feb 11, 2010 at 11:45 am

  p.s.: I also like this cartoon

• 4 Steve // Feb 16, 2010 at 11:03 am

  Thanks for the article. Good points and I enjoyed the comic. There are a few cloud providers offering custom solutions though, Carpathia Hosting for example. Come 2/23 there will be a big announcement that will support this claim even more.

• 5 Balakrishna Narasimhan // Feb 16, 2010 at 9:55 pm

  Tom, great point about how companies need to clearly define their service requirements and understand how they can best work with cloud service providers. We think that enterprises, especially medium-to-large companies need to work with a new class of partners to make the most of the cloud. This new class of providers, of which we are one, will focus on smoothing the path to the cloud. Our objective is to help enterprises with the entire lifecycle of cloud adoption – from building a business-case driven roadmap to the cloud, to migration services, to custom development services, to on-going support services, to products that connect and extend cloud applications. As you point out, the combination of a comprehensive set of solutions that abstract away the complexity of managing cloud platforms is what is needed to drive enterprise cloud adoption. This is exactly what we aspire as companies move toward an increasingly “cloudsourced” IT environment. (more here http://blog.appirio.com/2009/09/cloudsourcing-where-cloud-computing.html)

Leave a Comment

From the outside, HP's newest data center looks like a massive, well-secured loading dock, devoid of logos and surrounded by a robust barbed-wired fence in a nondescript industrial park.

Inside a green data center

How Desktop Virtualization Changes the Game for IT: Download now

The low-profile approach is intentional, as HP's Wynyard center is intended to hold the most valuable asset for many companies: their data. HP will use the data center to compete with companies such as IBM for IT services and management contracts, a growing source of revenue that requires secure data centers.

HP is hoping several of the environmentally friendly design features of the 360,000-square-foot Wynyard facility will push it ahead. It is HP's most energy efficient data center that it has built, said Maurice Julian, U.K. facilities project director. Half of the facility is now complete, comprising four data halls, with room to create four more data halls as demand dictates.

Related Content

The data center was originally started by IT outsourcer EDS, which was then acquired by HP for US$13.9 billion in May 2008. The building sits in a blustery and chilly area about eight miles west of the North Sea in the northeast of England. It is entirely air-cooled: HP has built eight 2.1-meter stainless steel and plastic intake fans to draw cool air.

The air runs through a massive bank of modular filters to remove dust and other contaminants before it circulates in a massive cavity, called a plenum, below its data center halls.

The air is forced up though the floor and runs over the front of server racks before being exhausted. The system keeps the hall at a constant 24C (75.2F). When it is cold outside, some of the exhausted heat is recirculated with the outside air to maintain the right temperature.

In Billingham, the outside temperature only rises above 24C for about 20 hours a year, but the facility still needed traditional chillers for those occasions, Julian said. To run a closed system, data center operators can close the louvers that let in outside air.

"It's an ideal climate for this type of solution," Julian said. "We're moving large volumes of air at a low speed."

Installing chillers in addition to building the natural air cooling added about 6 percent to the cost of building the data center, Julian said. The extra cost should be recouped in as few as two years due to the power savings.

Power is one of the highest costs for a data center. A facility's efficiency is measured in PUE, or Power Usage Effectiveness, which is a ratio that compares the total power used by a facility to the power used by its equipment.

Running at a full load, HP has calculated that the Wynyard facility has a 1.2 PUE, meaning that for every 1.2 watts of electricity used by the data center, 1 watt is used to power IT equipment, the rest being used for cooling and other facility needs.

Julian said each of the four data halls actually have a 1.16 PUE on their own, but that increases slightly to take into account electricity consumption in other areas, such as the 20,000-square foot office facilities.

• 1
• 2
• Next >

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.

Between Gmail, Google Docs, Zoho, Facebook, Basecamp, Flickr, Twitter and countless other applications, much of our data now sits in the cloud. But few people ever stop to think about where that data is stored or how it might be accessed or used. So who exactly does own your data and who has access to it? And how much privacy can you expect?

These questions get all the more complex because many web application providers are using cloud services from the likes of Amazon and Google, which means data doesn’t necessarily sit on the app provider’s servers. Additionally, there is an increased use of APIs to facilitate greater interoperability among web apps, meaning that your data may be used in many ways that you don’t expect. How can you learn more about the rights you have to your data, as well as the rights others have to it? GigaOM Pro (subscription required) this week has a great report by Simon Mackie that tackles these questions. The report delves into two main issues:

Data Privacy. When it comes to the U.S., the Fourth Amendment states that people should “be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures…” But web-hosted applications and cloud services are too new for the courts to have been able to provide far-reaching guidance on data privacy online. Issues related to data privacy get even more complex when data is stored outside of the country. Some cloud services, such as Amazon’s, let you choose the region in which you want your data stored; and some, such as Google’s, don’t.

Data Security. There are any number of threats to your data online. Your application or service provider could go belly up, you could fall prey to hackers or you could simply be locked out of your account. The good news is that data portability and security policies are being scrutinized closely by several organizations, and there are steps you can take to reduce your vulnerability in the could.

For much more on these and other issues pertaining to your data and the cloud, see Simon’s full report.

For companies protective of their IT operations and data, wholesale public cloud computing adoption can be a difficult pill to swallow. But cloud momentum is too strong a trend to ignore. Enter the hybrid cloud — a panacea of sorts, enabling companies to maintain a mix of on-premise and off-premise cloud computing resources, both public and private, managed through a common framework to simplify operations. This concept has steadily gathered steam over the last year and a half, and now appears poised to capture the minds, and wallets, of corporations in 2010.

First, let’s take a look at the reasons leading corporations to consider hybrid clouds, then the means for them to get there. Data security and control are most frequently mentioned as the drivers for corporations to own and manage a portion of their infrastructure. Most corporations have longstanding cultural biases toward keeping core IT assets in-house that are unlikely to change anytime soon.

That said, companies also want to take advantage of public cloud resources. One reason hybrid clouds are proliferating is to enable “cloudbursting,” or the ability to seamlessly and automatically grow workloads into public cloud resources for a period of time, and then decommission them once the heavy loads subside. For industries such as finance and health care, compliance regulations limit the number of public cloud offerings they can use, forcing some of their infrastructure to remain in-house.

Simple negotiating leverage will lead companies not to put all of their eggs in one public cloud basket, and maintaining private infrastructure provides one way to control, although not necessarily minimize, infrastructure costs. Also, the demands of a typical enterprise do not have the wide load swings of web applications, and in the cases where resource demand can be forecasted, owning infrastructure as a financed capital expense can be more advantageous than high monthly operating expenses.

The hybrid cloud market is being addressed by large technology vendors as well as open-source software projects in what might be classified as the ultimate battle between lock-in and unlock. On the large vendor side, VMware has been busy enabling both enterprises and service providers with a range of virtualization tools to deliver migration of virtual machines between on-premise and off-premise infrastructures. The company’s vCloud Express initiative allows service providers to offer infrastructure as a service offerings for enterprises while maintaining compatibility with internal VMware deployments.

More on The Cloud

• Who Exactly Owns Your Data in the Cloud? Tech Insider
• Elastra Makes Its Cloud Even Greener Tech Insider
• Google Docs Ratchets Up Flexibility With Files Tech Insider
• Leave Virginia Alone: On Open-source and Proprietary Threats Tech Insider

HP recently announced three offerings aimed at companies using both physical on-premise and cloud servers, including HP Operations Orchestration for provisioning, HP Cloud Assure for cost control, and HP Communications as a Service for service providers to offer small businesses on-demand solutions.

Microsoft has focused its Azure cloud platform on enterprises that can use the same Windows and .NET development frameworks on services internally and on the cloud. See our posts “Microsoft Azure Walks a Thin Blue Line” and “Will Microsoft Drive Cloud Revenues in 2010?” Even Amazon has started to reach towards hybrid deployment models with its Virtual Private Cloud service positioned as “a secure and seamless bridge between a company’s existing IT infrastructure and the AWS cloud.”

Approaching the market from another direction is a set of companies and open-source software projects that provide on-premise and public cloud integration. Eucalyptus is perhaps the best known in this category and provides open-source software infrastructure for on-premise cloud computing. Eucalyptus includes the ability to work within VMware environments and provision resources to Amazon Web Services.

Open Nebula, an open-source project out of the Distributed Systems Architecture Group at the Complutense University of Madrid, creates a new virtualization layer that “supports the dynamic execution of multi-tier services on a distributed infrastructure consisting of both data center resources and remote cloud resources.” And Nimbus, focused primarily on the scientific community, also provides a virtualization framework to help manage cloud deployments for infrastructure as a service.

The good news for enterprises considering hybrid cloud computing deployments is the range of options on the table. From the fully integrated end-to-end solutions like VMware or Azure, to the open-source solutions that provide more choice, the time is right to jump in and benefit from the cost savings, flexibility, and technology advances delivered by hybrid clouds.

Virtualization and private cloud trends, value propositions, obstacles, risk mitigation, and vendor selection are key topics in this December 2009 EMC interview with Frank Gens, IDC’s senior vice president and chief analyst*.

Read more

* IDC Analyst Connection sponsored by EMC, Virtualization and Private Clouds: Trends and Directions, Doc#IDC_863, Dec 2009.

The investigation should raise some concerns with the enterprise community. Such an investigation could cover aspects of Internet communications that have been in use for years.

How would the FTC distinguish between the rights of the consumer and businesses that also use cloud computing services? What regulations would drift into the enterprise sector?

Any service provider could be viewed as part of the investigation under such a broad umbrella. The obvious parties would include Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Rackspace and the other large cloud computing services.

SaaS is a form of cloud computing. That could mean a company like NetSuite, Zoho or Salesforce.com would have a stake in the outcome of such an investigation.

According toThe Hill, the investigation surfaced in a filing with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

In the filing, The FTC recognizes the cost savings of cloud computing but has concerns about information being stored remotely:

"However, the storage of data on remote computers may also raise privacy and security concerns for consumers," wrote David Vladeck, who helms the FTC's Consumer Protection Bureau.

This statement is puzzling. People have been storing their data remotely since the early 1990s on services that predate the social networks.

The intent of the inquiry is to protect consumers privacy. But the repercussions of such a broad investigation will also have reverberations throughout the enterprise community if the inquiry is not narrowed.

According to The Hill, the FTC is holding a roundtable Jan. 28 to focus on privacy protections. It will include specific discussions about cloud computing, identity management, mobile computing and social networking.