Today you can hear it everywhere. People are always talking about the “Cloud” regurgitating something that they heard at a conference, meeting or even an advertisement. But the reality remains that a lot of people don’t really understand what the cloud means. They imagine it’s some sort of magical or technologically advanced system that exists in space somewhere. However, close that may be to the truth what I have been amazed with is how their eyes open up when they realize that the cloud is nothing more than a server or a cluster of servers that exist in a datacenter that is independent of your physical location and the only way to reach it is over the Internet or WAN connection.
I do believe like we covered in class a lot of companies are now offering services over the Cloud. They prefer to have control over their product and prevent copyright infringement and piracy. Plus it’s very beneficial for a company to offer additional services when they already have you hooked. The “Holy Grail” of the internet has always been the ability of a Website to drive traffic toward it and maintain their presence for prolonged periods. But what about businesses, how do we drive business traffic toward our website? Yes a company can have a Facebook page or a twitter account but I don’t think many mangers want their employees surfing Facebook under the guise of social networking for the company. So what can we do to drive business traffic to a site and yet have employees be productive and most importantly charge them a fee? Enter; Cloud offerings but before we get into that let’s take a look at a little history.
What made the cloud possible? You have to be a big player to offer cloud offering to millions of people simultaneously but more than just a backend sever with some useful software you also need infrastructure. This would not have been possible 10 years ago when the internet bandwidth prices were so high. A company could get a T1, 1.544 Mbps for about $900.00 per month whereas today you can get triple that speed for less than half. So, besides bandwidth, the other major driving force in any datacenter is Drive space. Whether you’re using a SAN, SSD, TAPE or just a regular IDE OR SCSI Hard drive, you still need to have tons of space to support a large number of users and their data. Again a few years ago Terabytes which can store about 70 hours of HD video cost a pretty penny. Today you can get a Terabyte drive for about $100. It’s gotten to the point where Servers and San’s are talking in terms of Petabytes (1000Terabytes), I know sounds ridiculous.
Another piece of ingenuity is the ability for software to constantly compress data that is not being used regularly. This software intelligently can look for data that is not accessed regularly and compress it more than data that is used on a daily bases. GMAIL is one of the front runners in that Field. They knew that people want to hold on to their E-mails. Who likes deleting an E-mail? Not me. Well even if I don’t delete it doesn’t mean I’m going to read it often, so my older e-mails are compressed to a higher degree which frees up more space on the server. Pretty smart I thought. Other companies have since followed suit.
Virtualization is another key concept that made the cloud offerings possible. I think that many companies were wary about having their data on the same server as another company’s data. What if there was a mistake and someone else saw my data. Yes, I know there can be security measure in place etc but try explaining that to a company lawyer, good luck. What we need or want is our own server. A server that can be shutdown, rebooted, configuration changes made to it and still not be worried about anyone else’s schedule. So, if you hosted a 1000 companies and every company wanted to have 3 servers you would need real estate for 3000 servers, electricity, cooling and manpower. Now let’s imagine that you did have that space and infrastructure to house that many servers. How do you grow efficiently? Let say 200 customers wanted to add 2 more servers, your cost to add 400 more servers may be as high as adding a thousand more servers and it may not make sense when you take into account the cost of electricity, cooling etc. So, do you tell your client, no? They would just take their business elsewhere. When Virtual Technology was introduced most hosted solution companies like Rackspace, jumped on the Virtual bandwagon and adopted this technology. This allowed companies to have their own server that was just theirs. They could reboot, shutdown and upgrade when they pleased. Plus from a hosting company point of view they don’t need to keep increasing their real estate and related costs to expand their customer base.
Okay so we covered the backend. We looked at the how advancements in technology made the cloud possible but what about the offering. What do cloud services offer us or their business customers and why do they feel confident investing millions of dollars in software and hardware?
BACKUP
There are many companies that offer the ability to backup your important documents for free. We touched on this in class, where we were asked about backing up our home computer data, like home videos, pictures and documents. There are companies like MOZY, Amazon Cloudrive, Google Drive, Skydrive by Microsoft and tons of other companies offering the same service that vary mostly in pricing. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. Most home users will take advantage of this service. But businesses will need to plan more about recovery than just a backup. A backup that takes you a week to recover is not really a backup strategy. So when choosing these backup strategies one has to pay attention to how fast they can get you “your” data back.
SAS ( Software as a service)
We covered some of these examples in class from the simple Office 365 and google Docs example to the more complicated CRM (Customer Relationship management) offerings like Salesforce etc. These software offerings require a lot of horsepower and a lot of know how to run and be maintained. I like the analogy that you can’t buy a Bentley and take it to the corner garage and have them tinker with it. So the cloud makes these advanced software’s available and help grow smaller companies by helping them save costs and become more efficient.
E-mail
Exchange E-mail services allow a company many features that few other e-mail services can aspire to offer. From scheduling meetings, tracking, Web access, Phone access, Security are a few basic features. Ease of setup, cost and maintenance are not some of the feature offered by the software giant. Exchange Servers software is license based and requires a mammoth server and storage to run efficiently. Let’s not get into redundancy and scalability costs. Your costs could easily rise to a full time position or a consultant charging you a lot of money monthly. Many small to medium sized companies have made the transition to the cloud offered e-mail service. For one you look professional and have your own domain and are not reduced to using Gmail in order to save a buck. You don’t have to worry about upgrading your hardware or your software. You don’t have to worry about a second internet line for redundancy or you don’t have to worry about downtime. These clouds have uptime of about 99.99%. Backups are something that loomed over small companies as a dark cloud. These new cloud services will keep all the e-mail that you want. For a price of course.

Office/Business tools
So something no business can do without is Microsoft office. They seem to have a new version out almost every 18 months and although their prices for students and home users get cheaper or seem reasonable they are ridiculous for companies and governments. Office is one of the largest costs to an organization from a Software purchase point of view. A small company of about 10 users would have to spend close to $4000.00 to get the full package. This is a cost of about $400 a user which would have to be upgraded in about 2 years. Plus, do all your users use this package enough to make it a worthwhile purchase? Google first started offering Google apps about 4 years ago. They offered it as a license per user basis. You could turn it on or off as required and you paid the bill monthly. You could add features for more money or take them off to save some. Microsoft offers Office 365 which is office in the cloud. This is a great service and many small and big companies are switching to them every day.
Is the “Cloud” right for you and your company?
So, yes, this is a great tool and its great way to save money but like we discussed in class and CIO John Anderson pointed out. There is more to the cloud than meets the eye. You can’t go blind and accept this service no matter how great it is. As an IT manager that is vetting many potential vendors you have to make sure that you know who you’re going to be doing business with. Because if they go down, you go down. So that being said, here are some items to look out for.
1) Uptime, availability and redundancy: This may seem simple enough that a large cloud company would have thought of this but you have to do your due diligence. You have to ask the intelligent questions to get the right answers because no company is going to advertise their weaknesses. So, things to look for are; Number of datacenters, Power management and redundancy at those datacenters, Network backup strategy, Storage backup. These are just a few high level points that have to looked over with a fine toothed comb before making the plunge.
2) Certifications: Various certifications like SAS 70 Compliance, PCI Compliance, SSAE16, SOC2 and SOC3 are some of the Data center standards that you should look for. These standards although stringent and industry wide accepted they are not an insurance policy. You have to think twice before putting all your eggs in one basket.
3) Data Retrieval or data access: This has been a point of contention between many managers, lawyers and owners of data and information. Some information is too sensitive and sometimes worth too much money. If certain information about Apples new product line fell into the wrong hands it could weaken the company’s product disruption tactics. So can you trust a third party with your data. Next is, how are the many ways I can access my data? I know I can download it but what about the backups? Can I have access to them? How do I access them if I want them? Do I have to make a phone call or send an e-mail and how long do I have to wait to receive “MY” data? Some companies have a turnaround time of 3 weeks for you to get your data on a DVD or TAPE DISK. That seems ridiculous to me.
4) Support: People underestimate the need for great or good support. This is something that should be looked into with great care. Now they may be a great company and have a great product but when it comes to service they make you feel like a second class citizen. You have to make sure that they are responsive when it comes to booting or rebooting unresponsive servers. Or just answering a simple question about access. Your data is in their possession. You shouldn’t have to wait too long to get to it.
5) Monitoring: Once the data is located in their datacenter you have to make sure that you can get informed when something bad happens. What are their response times? How fast do they deal with an outage and how fast do they resolve issues. What are their contingency plans? What if you’re a small customer? Do they treat you differently than their bigger customers? Realistically they will but how much differently will make the difference.
6) Reviews and Research: This may be one of the hardest steps but sometimes it’s better to just pick up the phone and ask someone what they think about a provider. Do they like them? What has been their general experience with the provider? This is where peer groups come in handy and can help you make a more educated decision based on their own personal experiences.
In a nut shell Virtualization is great and solves a lot of problems but as IT manager you have to make sure that the solution suits your organization and budget. It’s capable of responding to your organizations changes and growth or downsizing.