Cloudy and Hold the Meatballs

First published in  The Star, April 14, 2014

The IT world is up in the clouds. That should be a capital “C”, because the latest buzz is about Cloud technology.  Cloud is not new, having been with us now for a number of years. Conceptually, pundits claim that cloud computing goes much further back to the days of the greenscreen and mainframe computer.  However, everyone - the media, analysts, vendors – have never been hotter over Cloud than now.  And perhaps the picture has never been cloudier.

In the simplest terms, Cloud computing can be thought of as a utility: computing power on tap.  It’s there when the user needs it at the click or two of a mouse.  Like tap water or electricity. To the end-user, the promise is enormously seductive: no more need to worry about IT infrastructure, security, maintenance and having to put up with geeky IT managers who always want more money to upgrade the servers, whatever those are.

The concept is simple enough, and to the casual consumer, who uses a tablet or smartphone, Cloud is here – sign in to an application, such as Facebook, update your status, read what your friends are up to, upload your photos and magic happens. The user doesn’t need to know anything about what sort of computing infrastructure holds all this up, where it is, how much storage is needed or any of those pesky questions.  He just needs to be connected to the “Cloud”.

The “Cloud” is thus an idea of pervasive computing, without the complexity of the back-end, all those messy things that take ages to set up, maintain, test and develop.

However, businesses aren’t like casual consumers, because businesses depend on IT systems for their survival, and for competitive advantage. To make things more complicated, there are terms such as IAAS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service), PAAS (Platform-as-a-service), SAAS (Software-As-a-service), public and private clouds, provisioning and so on.  It’s enough to cloud anyone’s mind.

There are many ways to think about Cloud computing, but let’s start with its value to the business. 

We can start with the simplest, most complete and ideal version of computing utopia:  computing power available on demand, on tap, without the expense and complexity of the infrastructure.  IT systems – with all their plumbing, machines and personnel – is what’s usually called a Capital Expense in financial terms, a collection of assets for which there is a large amount of money expended upfront, and used over many years, like the new elevator you installed, or the new industrial factory machine.

Cloud computing however, can be viewed as an Operating Expense, like petrol used, supplies consumed, salaries paid.  It is money expended during the current term of the business, and therein lies an important insight:  Cloud computing can fundamentally alter the way that computing resources are viewed and consumed by the business.

Extending this idea even further, when you need more electricity – for example, you just installed several new airconditioners – the additional electricity is instantly available.  You don’t have to purchase a new generator to go with the new airconditioners, do you?

So Cloud is similar – say a business has a constant demand for services throughout the year, but a huge spike once a year – perhaps during Christmas. Normally, the business buys enough IT power to meet that annual once-a-year demand, but the rest of the time, the IT infrastructure is underutilized.

With Cloud computing, that problem disappears, if you need more computing power, it’s there – instantly and transparently, and the business only pays for what it needs. That’s a quality called “Elasticity”.

This insight is important because it can alter the relationship of business to IT, and whether you like it or not, IT is the lifeblood of modern business, unless you’re running a small cottage industry – and even then, you need IT if you can get it.  The interesting thing you may have noted is that with Cloud computing, in theory, even the small cottage industry now has access to IT, even though they could never afford it before and had no idea how to go about it.  Now that is a truly transformative proposition, isn’t it – that even a small family business with no knowledge of IT now has access to the power of IT computing, courtesy of the Cloud?

In practice, life isn’t always as easy as downloading an ‘app’ from the Cloud and using it. Many businesses already have established IT systems, have valuable data locked up in their databases, may have invested millions in custom-built IT systems to be competitive.  But that doesn’t mean they can’t leverage the power of Cloud computing, it only means they do so in a manner appropriate to the business.  They may want to expand or diversify, or modernize, or begin to market and reach customers differently, to start doing things differently from before.  In fact, if you delve into it a little more, Cloud allows bold and visionary organizations to do things that they simply couldn’t do before.  It is as transformative to human civilization as the Internet was in its time.  (Remember when there was no online banking and you had to go to an airline office to buy a physical ticket and had to wait for the newspaper to get the news or go to the store to buy your music on CDs?)

By the way, it doesn’t mean that Cloud technology is a ‘must-have’ – there are many situations when Cloud is not suitable to organizational needs.  Cloud technology is an enabler, ie, used appropriately, it can change business and organizational models, and turn traditional ideas on their heads – such as Return on Investment, computing models, the reach of businesses and so on.

All very nice, but what about Security? How safe is my data if it’s in ‘the cloud’, held by some anonymous entity under conditions outside my control?  How do I know competitors can’t get a peek into how my systems work? What about Performance and Reliability? Right now, I can exactly control how my systems work – I have no control over the Cloud!  And what if I just want to keep my existing applications but just “Cloudify” them?  And what if I don’t want to share that with anyone else?  Or keep my existing systems as they are but just install my new applications on a Cloud? 

There’s nothing to say a business can’t own and operate its own cloud (what’s called a “Private Cloud”) instead of using a shared one (a “Public cloud”) or a mix (a “Hybrid cloud”), or have someone manage its Cloud (a “Managed Private Cloud), or that it only buys the Cloud Infrastructure but own everything else on top (“Infrastructure-as-a-cloud”)  – but as you can see, there’s a large number of variations here.

These, and a whole host of others, are all valid concerns. Any new transformative technology has always brought a whole host of problems never faced before, but there’s also the promise that for the bold and the visionary, that new ideas and innovations allow transformative changes that alter the way that businesses, and societies work.

We live a era of unprecedented change, but even then, every now and then, something comes along that has the capability to overturn conventional wisdoms and established ways of doing things.  These are sometimes called ‘disruptive’ technologies, which is an understated way of saying that empires can rise and fall, and ways of life can change.  It’s a truism to say that the future of Cloud technology is not in the very least cloudy.