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The Case Against Cloud Computing, Part Three

The Case Against Cloud Computing, Part Three

Two, use an appropriate comparison yardstick. The issue isn't what cloud providers will put in writing, it's how will a cloud provider stacks up against the available alternatives. If you're using an outsourcer that consistently fails to meet its uptime commitments, surely it makes sense to try something new? And if the comparison is the external cloud provider versus your internal IT group, the same evaluation makes sense.

Third, remember that the quality of internal uptime is directly related to the sophistication of the IT organization. While large organizations can afford significant IT staffs and sophisticated data centers, much of the world limps by with underfunded data centers, poor automation, and shorthanded operations staffs. They run from emergency to emergency, and uptime is haphazard. For these kind of organizations, a cloud provider may be a significant improvement in quality of service.

Fourth, even if you're satisfied with the quality of your current uptime, examine what it costs you to achieve it. If you're using lots of manual intervention, people on call, staffing around the clock, you may be meeting uptime requirements very expensively. A comparison of uptime and cost between the cloud and internal efforts (or outsourced services) may be instructive. I spoke to a fellow from Google operations who noted that at the scale it operates, manual management is unthinkable; nothing goes into production until it's been fully automated. If you're getting uptime the old-fashioned way-plenty of elbow grease-it may be far better, economically speaking, to consider using the cloud.

Fifth, and a corollary to the last point, even if there are some apps that absolutely, positively have to be managed locally due to stringent uptime requirements, recognize that this does not cover the entirety of your application portfolio. Many applications do not impose such strict uptime requirements; managing them in the same management framework and carrying the same operations costs as the mission-critical apps is financially irresponsible. Examine your application portfolio, both current and future, and sort them according to hard uptime requirements. Evaluate whether some could be migrated to a lower-cost environment whose likely uptime capability will be acceptable-and then track your experience with those apps to get a feel for real-world outcomes regarding cloud uptime. That will give you the data to determine whether more critical apps can be moved to the cloud as well.

In a sense, the last recommendation is similar to the one in the "Risk" posting in this series. One of the recommendations in that posting is to evaluate your application portfolio according to its risk profile to identify those which can safely be migrated to a cloud infrastructure. This uptime assessment is another evaluation criteria to be applied in an assessment framework.

So "cloud SLA" is not an oxymoron; neither is it a reason to avoid experimenting and evaluating how cloud computing can help you perform IT operations more effectively.

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