Awareness of Cloud Computing continues to increase

My biggest fear is safety and lack of ownership of the data.

If I have dedicated servers and storage, then that is 100% mine, no body shares it, and there is enough resilience in place to absorb a component failure.

Worse case, DR is implemented and my site is up and running on new tin from backups within a maxumium of 12 hours.

My fear of cloud stuff (from supporting early IBM inceptions, and hearing horror stories from colleagues who still do) is that when it goes wrong, it goes spectacuarly wrong, knocking out multiple blue chip clients. All the resiliance in the world and salesman patter won't stop some component somewhere becoming an achilles heel, when the fail over switch doesn't, and the house of cards comes crashing down!

A little bit like losing a VPS, you impact all the clients that were on it.

Some of these cloud solutions are incredibly complex, and I've seen mistakes at the technical level that have led to wrong allocations of storage space, even customer storage overlapping each other, and as the volumes get larger and larger, the recovery and DR plan gets ever more complex.

Give me a pair of dedicated physical servers, loadbalanced, with their own resiliant storage, and I'm a happy chap.

But, thats an expensive option, and the cloud concept does offer massive cost savings.

I personally think this is a technology that has yet to mature, but it is getting there. As with all things business, its down to cost/risk versus reward.

But I am guilty of being a bit of a dinosaur, and it took a while for me to be convinced to put this forum on a virtual box! But my bread and butter sits on hardened dedicated servers, and it would take some serious convincing to put my database in the cloud

A lot of very good points well made there Steve!

Like you where cost would allow I would opt for the dedicated server route, however many SME's cant afford this option and thats where cloud comes into its own.

The earlier solutions you mentioned were certainly vulnerable to the issues you mention, however in the last 12 months alone massive strides have been made in the technologies thanks to the war between Microsoft, google, Amazon and others to get a leg up on the competition.

Smaller vendors like Cloud4 Computers have the luxury of being vendor netral and can implement the best solution set for each service we provide and build it with resiliance across multiple data centres.

We are developing new several new services but our ethic is only to release them to market when they are bomb proof and, importantly for us, best in market!

We all accept that cloud computing is yet to mature, in fact a recent gartner report says exactly that, that cloud has 10 years to mature. But as a cloud service provider thats really exciting for us!

Looking ahead, our next services to market will be robust and available by xmas and are:

- Vitrual Private Cloud - VPC
- Dedicated Servers
- Colocation

Followed early next year by:

- Hosted Microsoft Dynamics 4.0

There are more Pro's than cons for simple cloud based services already like

- Hosted Exchange, (gartner predicts over 12m users by 2013)
- Online backup, (increasingly the obvious choice for DR)
- Hosted Desktop, (computing anywhere and why by a server for the network benefits)

So although I am with you Steve.. CLoud Computing is destined to be the next global shift in computing. The future is in the Cloud!

Phil

Being vendor neutral gives you a great edge in customising solutions, but does that cause you education and training head aches?

I know Stavros has said similar in the past, but I'm more interested now in the quality of the techies supporting my kit, rather than the cost. In otherwords, I would (and do) pay more for better support (forum aside!)

Outages now are no longer a nuisance, but are now a potential threat to businesses reputations, as well as loss of revenue. Apparently uptime and site speed are now signals in Big G's mighty algorythm.

Maybe this is a market worth tapping into, or is the general SME hosting model still high volume and cheap?

Think your right though, the longterm future will be cloud computing, and hopefully that will include fibre connections to the household

Vendor neutral doing really cause us headaches as out tech team is top class. I would put our team agains't most in UK at least. Our #1 USP is our service, as a example of this we have built over 6000 users on out hosted exchange and not ONE has ever left us in over 2 years.

Some of our services are much more complicated than this but the service ethos runs throughout the business and did from the start as our key USP.

In computing things go wrong no matter what measures you apply. It's how you react to and manage the incidents with the utmost understanding of how this can impact on your clients business that defines you!

What we see currently is to many providers are desperate to rush services to market to say they are "in cloud" without them being completely robust and optimised for the user. Many of these companies will fall away as the product set matures and those who did it right, will emerge. We aim to be in the latter group

Oh and Pleeeesse fibre to my house! we get a whopping 3mb to our house yet have a 100mb bearer into the office.... How frustrating is that!

Hmm Clould computing stick your finger in the air and pick a definition:

As a seasoned IT pro I have been witness to may paridigm shifts and cloud computing seems to be the latest IT buzz word.

I have been dumping customers enviroments into metaframe and esx for years, for some infrastructures it works. other it does not.

The biggest downfall for cloud computing is PP bandwidth in the UK, until that is sorted I am not sure that it is ready for a SMBdomestic market.

example: in my office we get the 2pm slow down, web browsing slows down but I crack on with my work using word and outlook which are installed locally, now imagine if I was using live docs and the 2pm slow down kicked in.

On a personal level I love cloud computing. I love webmail, I love google docs, I love that my Android phone co-ordinates with it all.

Even on a local level, my ideal setup at home would be to have a lovely powerful central machine that was the actual computer and then just have a terminal in every room that I could pick up, log into my session, and carry on.

What I don't know about is cloud security. For this reason, unless a client *asks* me to work on something already in the cloud, I still work in the more traditional way of making a document locally, saving it, and emailing it as an attachment.

I just can't bring myself to trust the reliability and availability either - for important things I want a locally stored copy which I will back up myself to a separate drive. Not to mention how annoying it is when you have a document on the cloud... you have a device capable of viewing said document... you want to view it... but you've got no mobile signal, no wifi, no connectivity at all and therefore can't get at it.

Just reading Stavros's post, and the more I think about it, the more I try and work out what the actual definition of cloud computing is.

If I set up a new server, installed open office, and said here you go Virtually Mary, feel free to use the applications on my Server, so you don't need a local version, does that make mean I'm offering Cloud services?

Or is it more of a resiliant distributed computing model, so my server with open office on is actually load balanced with an identicle one in a different data centre, and any documents Mary saves, are automatically saved in both locations?

So one node in the cloud goes down, but the end user doesn't care, because the cloud is still available.

I'm fascinated to understand what a Virtual Private Cloud is? Would that be some kind of loadbalanced VPS running a choice off applications like exchange?

I can see the advantage of dumping the office servers, and moving the exchange box, file servers, dc's etc into a cloud environment which was completely private to me, secure and resiliant, so if I lost the file server, it's replicated in minutes to another node. But as already said, our particular t'internet access is medieval, with a ropey old BT exchange and no cable

Maybe one day...

Steve, If you PM me your email I'll forward some more info on VPC with a visual representation. The high level description though is:

VPC
The service delivers a possibility to use the external cloud service to utilise virtual machines in real IT production instead of only providing a platform for web applications. The VPC Service will enable a connectivity between customer datacenter directly to an external cloud and therefore enable you to build bridges between local and remote applications without losing their centralised management. The VPC helps customers to reduce cost by making it possible to outsource selected applications directly to an external entity.

You wouldn't put an exchange server in the VPC as it is to memory hungry but anything else, DC, file/print, web servers etc are perfect for this application.

Phil

Good thread and discussion... I found the wikipedia article interesting on it too.. Cloud computing