There have been several articles in the industry press recently about “problems” with cloud computing services, specifically Google, Amazon, Apple, etc. Basically it comes down to outages.

Cloud computing is not a silver bullet, just like anything else is not a silver bullet. The way a lot of people talk about cloud computing, at least the way it is used today, it is just another name for consuming externally hosted services. Consuming externally hosted services will always have these flaws: (1) the Internet is inherently an unreliable network, (2) service providers can have temporary interruptions in their service, (3) service providers can betray the customer in big ways such as compromising sensitive customer data or by going out of business entirely.

So how to deal with these issues? Try the following:

  • create an SLA (service level agreement) with the service provider, so expectations are set with both parties, and the service provider can incur penalties for breach of be encouraged to keep the agreement.
  • have an offline/sync capability for the service so your business process can keep running during a temporary outage of the service provider, and merge non-destructively when they are back up.
  • keep local backups of your cloud data in case the cloud gets corrupted. Usually storage is cheaper than transaction processing to replicate locally.
  • run your piece of the cloud internally, so you maintain control of the infrastructure. In effect, you become part of the cloud, with the only customer being you.

Not every business process is business critical, and all have different risk elements/levels. I use Mozy for backup, keep things in the Google cloud, and others. But I don’t run drop-dead business-critical processes in someone else’s cloud. In the end, you are responsible for your I/T. Cost management and risk management always go together. If you want to reduce the cost by shifting the ownership/management to someone else (the service provider), be prepared for increased risk, or at least the perception of increased risk, because you no longer control the infrastructure for your business process. I/T is still a balancing act.

I think there is more to cloud computing than simply consuming externally hosted services.