UPDATED 14:37 EDT / MARCH 01 2013

Four Issues Keep CIOs from the Cloud

While CIOs express numerous concerns when discussing trusting mission-critical applications to the Cloud, they really boil down to four primary issues, writes Wikibon Analyst Scott Lowe.  As a consultant and former CIO himself, he writes from experience.

Those issues are the risk of outages, the lack of skills and understanding of how Cloud services work, concern over maintaining SLAs, and the difficulty in developing a good handle on the cost of the service over time.

Outages certainly happen to in-house systems. But they are not common, and a system failure in an average company is usually kept private within the company’s walls. When AWS goes down, as it did the day before Christmas 2012, or Microsoft Azure has a worldwide service outage as it did in mid-February, it becomes very public. Cloud services do operate in a more dangerous environment and are at risk of overloads caused either by unanticipated spikes in legitimate traffic or denial-of-service or other Internet-based attacks. And CIOs are right to be concerned about a mission-critical system being involved. However, Lowe writes, CIOs are also often too cautious about using a new approach even when it offers obvious advantages. And ways do exist to avoid or minimize the impact of service provider outages.

The skills gap is a very real problem. Cloud computing changes the way IT organizations function and demands different knowledge. This, Lowe writes, is no different from the skills issues of earlier major technology changes — remember when Web designers were in huge demand and scarce on the ground. The answer is either to hire new people with the required skills or invest in training existing staff in the new skills.

SLAs are a more difficult problem. In general, Lowe writes, “Cloud provider service level agreements aren’t all that great….” As standards between providers are implemented, organizations will be able to spread their risk not only across multiple data centers in a single provider but also between multiple providers. That will help both the SLA and outage issues.

Cloud services often sell themselves in part on providing equal functionality for lower cost. But in fact that is not always true, particularly when compared to a fully virtualized internal system. And even when it is, it is difficult often to pin down just how much a specific service will cost a particular company. Costs depend on a number of variables, Lowe writes, including the amount of data that needs to be transferred each month and the amount of incoming versus outgoing traffic the application will generate. Those new skills that IT needs include the ability to monitor these and other measures that different Cloud providers use to determine billing.

All of these issues do have solutions, Lowe writes. And Cloud services offer advantages that CIOs cannot afford ignore. Organizations can often try out services for free either for a limited amount of use or time. CIOs should have someone on staff responsible for detailed Cloud service testing and analysis to find where these services can fit into their strategy, rather than just rejecting them out-of-hand.

Like all Wikibon research, Lowe’s full Alert is available on the Wikibon site for free. IT professionals are invited to register for free membership in the Wikibon community, which allows them to comment on research and post their own Professional Alerts, tips, and white papers for the community to read. It also gets them invitations to the Wikibon Peer Incite meetings, at which their peers discuss how they have leveraged advanced technologies and services to solve real-world problems.


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