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Sunday 30 November 2008, 8:51 PM
Is Your Head (And Data) In The Clouds?
The concept of cloud computing is not new. Your data in Facebook and Hotmail has been in the clouds for years and most end users are none the wiser, beyond enjoying the ability to interact with their data remotely instead of being tied to a computer or a mobile device with limited storage. But the lure of cutting costs is driving more corporates to store their data in a cloud rather than in their own managed facility. This is a trend that has been accelerated by well known companies like Amazon, Google or Microsoft, generating addition income streams by renting out their huge spare server capacity.
Cash-strapped small to medium-sized companies were quick to realise they could save a fair amount by not owning their own servers. But a great number of so called ‘server farms’ have sprung up to serve the market, causing IT managers concern over data security and privacy issues as well as continuity of service. That’s also been an issue with hosting companies cutting corners in a rush to launch new services and charging full price for services that should perhaps still be labelled ‘beta test’.
Just like the sky itself, all clouds are not equal. And some clouds are more than capable of pouring rain on your parade. In the last year I have seen a number of failures in these cloud server farms. Sadly, some of these well publicised failings have involved well known hosting companies where all the backup data was stored on one massive server, meaning hundreds, if not thousands of customers were separated from their data for days as thousands of terabytes of data were copied back onto servers.
It’s a situation that no-one should find themselves in. Cloud computing services should not put your data backups into huge storage units. Instead they should split backup data into manageable amounts stored on regular servers. If one server fails, it therefore only affects a few customers for a short time as much smaller chunks of data need to be restored. You should also look for companies that offer servers in secure datacentres, managed by on-site staff, located in various parts of the country, giving you a choice of geographically diverse locations for storage of your data.
Now that the data is being stored online, more and more of us are working on the move from mobile devices. It’s all too easy for records of their interactions with clients to get lost. It may be a case of ‘out of sight, out of mind’, but the integrity of data storage is crucial to business survival. Data loss to a company, while rarely immediately fatal, is often the trigger for a succession of customer service, invoicing and financial problems that eventually bring the company down. In 2002 a report by McGladrey & Pullen indicated that a company prevented from getting at its data for 10 days never fully recovers and 43% go under. You wouldn’t drive a car with two wheels missing would you? So why risk your business data in the clouds, unless you know it is in a secure and proven facility.
One company I've come across recently that ticks all these boxes and seems to be doing great stuff in cloud computing is Xtraordinary Hosting. It's great to see an innovative early adopter in niche technology go to so much trouble to help customers gain and retain competitive advantage.
Christian Harris
Managing Director, BidUpBiz.com
PreviousComments on this post
We may find ourselves in a survival of the cleverest type situation here Christian. There will always be those that leap before they think, and these individuals and companies may come a croper if all their eggs are put into one basket. Those that as you say spread their data around may be at a distinct business advantage if others data goes down a plug hole or is even struck by a missile.
Hi Roger. I've never put my business 'eggs in one basket', which is why in this post I strongly advise others not to do the same with cloud computing. Just like outsourcing, your business information is in the hands of another company - and that makes me sweat! Shop around and don't rush into anything.
Me rush? never, ha ha, I've only got as far the skydrive and it's side kicks. I use these facilities to bounce types of freeware and text around the sky so I can pull them down when I get to my destination. I am only playing around with tiny amounts of data so life is easy and free in that respect.
Thank goodness I'm not in IT, or at least in the server/services side! Cloud computing as far as I can determine only has one component that is really new. The idea that anonymous servers can be tricked into operating as if they are "owned" or resident domain servers by the company renting their service.
In another post here I illustrated the solution my company uses of a "cloud in a bottle". The company purchased servers that are remotely located and managed by resident staff, which looks a lot like a remotely hosted and managed server farm.
The big difference is that it has been duplicated identically with another system operated by another separate company in a separate facility some hundred or more miles away. Failover internally at each server farm is automatic and then failover to the backup can be managed remotely with a few keystrokes.
Overall the IT guy seems to have done a good job with enough foresight to imagine most disaster scenarios.
The key ingredient is the 2 service company approach. If one goes belly-up, presumably the other won't fail simultaneously. That's the only thing obvious I would add to your "bulletpoints".
Hi Christian,
Great article, you hit a number of issues that should be considered by anyone looking at clouds and cloud storage. Scale is a challenge. Outages at Amazon have shown that. Don’t get me wrong, Amazon is doing great things but mega-scale clouds are not easy and even the best of teams have had hiccups. What I think you will see next year is an increase in service provider offerings in modest scale with specialized offerings (more about that here: http://blog.parascale.com/?p=26 ). Using packaged offerings from companies like EMC and ParaScale will enable service providers to avoid the beta offerings and combined eggs. Another big issue is cloud lock-in. Two challenges here. The first is bandwidth billing for data in/out of the cloud. My feeling is competition will drive this down. The bigger challenge is custom APIs (REST for example) for writing data to the cloud. Once you tweak your applications to speak that language it’s painful to change. Today we are seeing a change in the industry in support for standard protocols. WebDAV and NFS are well known and well integrated and started to show up in cloud storage offerings. In time the rain will pass and cloud consumers will see the true benefits of these offerings.
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Mike Maxey
ParaScale
