The Cloud - haute couture or bargain basement?
Jinfo Blog

By Tim Buckley Owen

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Will 2011 really turn out to be “the year that cloud computing reaches the masses”?  Figures revealed by one recent survey are certainly striking; trouble is, there’s a world of difference between engaging a dedicated enterprise cloud provider and simply going to the virtual equivalent of your local Big Yellow self storage depot – and many a slip between the two.

Only 36% of companies are not planning any investment in cloud-based services this year, according to a survey of its own customers carried out by IT management software specialist Ipswitch Inc.  Now immediately this raises issues about the representativeness of the sample; they’re likely to be more cloud-savvy than the average – witness the fact that fully 29% are investing in a private cloud service, compared with only 13% who are going for exclusively public services offered by the likes of Amazon or Microsoft Azure.

But that doesn’t invalidate the fact that there are plenty of mistakes to be made – most likely by the IT department, with nasty knock-on effects to those actually responsible for the management of records and the regulatory and compliance obligations that that involves.  As LiveWire reported recently, Gartner too believes that cloud computing will be CIOs’ top priority this year, while Ovum warns of what could happen if they get it wrong.

Now a salutary story in the iconoclastic Register newsletter highlights some of the concerns that information managers should be considering.  It follows an incident where the public image storage service Flickr accidentally deleted a photographer’s 4,000 accumulated pictures.

Cloud storage providers can’t guarantee that their employees will never do anything stupid with their customers’ data and probably can’t afford to fight lawsuits when they do, says the article’s author Dan Olds of Gabriel Consulting.  So the options are to offer no guarantees at all (which is how Olds says many cloud providers are operating today) or to store things for an absurdly long time to be on the safe side, or to negotiate comprehensive service level agreements like the enterprise providers do – all of which adds to costs and cuts into the provider’s margins.

Now admittedly that’s at the bargain basement end of the market.  But midway between the dedicated enterprise provider and the public services lies software as a service delivered as part of a workflow solution package – such as Autonomy’s newly unveiled cloud-based information management platform for the legal market.

Based on the company’s Intelligent Data Operating Layer (IDOL), the claim is that its modular offering can help legal professionals manage their content through the entire legal process.  Striking a balance between individually customised private services and bog standard public offerings, perhaps an Autonomy-style model represents the lowest risk option for infopros.

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