Cloudburst
Jinfo Blog

By Tim Buckley Owen

Item

April was a pretty terrible month for cloud computing. There are lessons to be learned – especially, perhaps, about where in the enterprise cloud computing decisions are taken.

The downtime at Amazon Web Services, which took some service providers that depend on it offline, and the hacking of Sony’s Playstation Network, which compromised the privacy of millions of customers worldwide, are of different orders of magnitude. But as well as the timing, another common factor was both companies’ tardiness in providing any information about the incidents.

As the Economist reported, because Amazon and other providers have made it so easy for companies to shift their services to the cloud, some customers have been lulled into thinking they don’t need the same amount of backup protection as they would elsewhere. Yet there’s no shortage of warnings to chief information officers about the consequences of not being vigilant.

Gartner has recently highlighted some of the risks of cloud-enabled outsourcing. It’s “immature and fraught with potential hazards”, it warns, adding that organisations need to ensure they understand the short- and long-term implications of cloud services, on the demand and supply side, as well as on the sourcing lifecycle itself.

Too right. Recently information management company Iron Mountain quietly slipped out the news that it was “exploring strategic alternatives” for its digital business – which Gartner explained meant that it was dropping out of the public cloud storage market altogether, either helping existing customers to migrate to another provider or returning the data to them. Gartner also pointed out that this was the third such provider to drop out within the last 12 months, the others being Vaultscape and Atmos Online.

And as if that weren’t bad enough, there’s Greenpeace saying that cloud computing isn’t even very clean. How Dirty Is Your Data? includes a report card showing just how coal intensive the activities of some leading cloud-based service providers are, and lambasting their lack of transparency over their energy choices.

So will all this mean a backlash against all things Cloud?  Unlikely, if a report by the Cloud Industry Forum is to be believed. A poll of some 450 end user organisations by this cloud service provider body reveals that a staggering 94% of those currently using cloud services are happy with them, with only 2% of the respondents saying they would never use them.

Respondents did have some concerns, chief among which were data security, privacy and sovereignty. But probably most significant of all was the finding that over two thirds of cloud migration decisions were taken by the head of IT, compared with just a quarter taken by the boss.

Perhaps April’s Sony and Amazon debacles may induce bosses to think again.

« Blog