February 2010 "To Cloud or Not To Cloud"

“To cloud” or “Not to cloud”
The crash of Wordpress’s servers bringing down 10m blogs and losing 5.5m page views last weekend brought a short sharp shock to its users. The weakness of even a behemoth like WordPress, and the fact GoogleAps still only offers a mediocre uptime guarantee suggests that the fabled land of ‘cloud computing’ may still be a short while off.
Few would claim that WordPress is ‘cloud computing’ though it’s still housed within the same facilities, since 2007 we have seen less reliability on Google, BaseCamp, Huddle, and SalesForce than on Lucidica.com. This is not to say that our network is bigger or better, it’s just that coping with even the current strain of use these companies struggle to keep things up 100% of the time.
Cloud computing though has a strong future, and while we’d argue that the future isn’t here yet, here are some pros and cons for those of you considering the switch

The Good

• Cloud computing works better across the web, while VPNs and LogMeIn et al make it relatively easy to reach your workplace. When you’re out of your workplace if your ‘server’ is based in ‘the cloud’ it's going to work better than if it’s not.
• Cloud computing evolves, one of the best forms of ‘cloud computing’ I have seen is with mass email marketing programs. When we first started sending out mass emails we used a bulk emailer on a server in our building, about 3 years ago we migrated this online and have never looked back. The engine we use gets better pretty much every month with new features added, the bulk emailer we used is still available and still looks the same. More importantly though we have not had to run any updates or re-installations for our ‘cloud based’ system it just steadily improves.
• Cloud computing breaks but you don’t fix it, or even have to pay anyone to fix it, your subscription fee includes the maintenance of it (or it should). There is also an icreased chance that when it’s down it’s effecting a large perpotion of people so you can be pretty sure engineers are running around fixing things! :)
• Cloud computing has less ‘slowdown’; when you buy a new computer it’s nice and quick, and does what you want. Over the years it gets bogged down with programs and files and just can’t cope with newer programs, cloud computing should in fact speed up with time, so there shouldn’t be a need to upgrade your computer quite as often.
• Cloud computing is more cross platform; in many cases ‘the cloud’ is free from bias against Macs, Windows computers or even Linux.
• The ‘remote desktop’ or terminal services offers a virtual computer in the cloud and it’s just like having your PC you access in the office but on a quicker connection, it’s nice but not cheap; see below.

The Bad

• Online data storage is not cheap, we added 1TB of storage to our server the other day at a one off cost of ~£300. This can cost in excess of £500 a month to store this online.
• Many links in the chain; it’s not just the provider you need to worry about in terms of maintaining uptime, but also your internet provider. If your office loses internet connection then you could lose access to all of your files.
• Speed is the issue; the internet is still not quick, if you opening an Excel document and it’s stored online then it may only take an extra 30 seconds to open, but open a Photoshop document and you’ll have enough time to make coffee, open a video file and you’ll have enough time for lunch. Beyond some clever stuff from HP; video and images are a long way from finding a viable model for cloud based computing.
• While Microsoft Office rules the desktops, the ‘cloud’ is much more open at the moment, the battle lines are being drawn, compatibility issues are definitely going to confound people moving forward especially if they want to base all of their spreadsheets and documents on things like GoogleAps.
• The ‘remote desktop’ is not so cheap, prices can start as low as £30 per month, but going cheap is definitely not something you want to do with this kind of thing so you should be looking at £50-£100 per month per desktop to get something decent, even then it still can’t handle large graphics and certainly not video.

The Ugly

• Who controls the data; cloud computing is enough to make many IT Managers in big business white with fear as they lose control of pretty much everything. The amount of commercially sensitive data that SalesForce.com holds or increasingly GoogleAps is nearly immeasurable. If it were even suspected that SalesForce were selling this information it would ruin them overnight, it’s obviously in their interests to maintain a tight ship, for someone like GoogleMail (especially the free version) the case is less certain. On the free version they are supported by advertising, possibly advertising from your competitors that appear on your employees screen; targeted at them thanks to the content of the email. There are two massive risks to your business data;
• Deliberate leaks; maybe you sign up with www.mycloudbusinesscrm.com and happily put all your business data in its online CRM. What you didn’t read was that it makes its money by selling macro information on its users. Or perhaps the business is thoroughly above board, but 3 years later is purchased by a less scrupulous vendor who decides that the business isn’t profitable enough and decides to sell your data for fringe margin
• Accidental leaks; SalesForce.com takes security exceptionally seriously, but how clued up is your vendor? As soon as you chose an online provider you’re ‘tagging’ your data as business valuable. Bigger names than SalesForce.com have been hacked, and while it’s not worth an organisation targeting a small London based business. Many people would pay a huge amount of money for the data held by SalesForce. Just before Christmas the partially successful hack on GoogleMail resulted in their threatened withdrawal from China.
• It’s not just the platforms security you have to worry about, with the server in your office you can enforce password policies, logon restrictions, data retention, auditing; few cloud models offer anything like this. They are also more likely to be targeted by malware on your employees computers, leaving a massive risk for any organisation trying to tightly control their data.

The main issue is that once you have nicely packaged your data into an easily readable format and uploaded it to someone else’s server you at that point have lost control. You just need to hope that the platform remains secure and that your data remains safe. There is also a doubt over the retention period of many hosts, it could be that you hit delete, but the data remains online ‘somewhere’ hidden for the platform host to dissect for years to come.

Summary
If you are interested in cloud computing, we have clients using it in various forms, it really is not suitable for all, but definitely has value, particularly if you have a dispersed team or work a lot from home. As internet speeds get quicker, and hardware becomes cheaper, we’ll see increasing moves towards cloud based models, we’re pushing services into it by looking at the individual case, so if you’re struggling to work as flexibly as you’d like have a conversation with us and we’ll advise on the right steps for you.