What are the drawbacks of cloud computing?
Clouds pose more than just legal problems; there are technical ones, too, according to Bob Laliberte, analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group.
"We say about virtualization that it's hard to manage an environment where your applications are playing hide and seek and your hardware is lying to you," Laliberte says. "It's even more with clouds. You're having to try to manage someone else's hardware that's lying to you."
There is no single "cloud" involved in cloud computing, Laliberte says. All the SaaS and infrastructure-services providers use different technology and different standards, meaning every vendor relationship will be different. You can't just tool up one application or business process for "the cloud" and be ready to go.
You also can't just move applications to the cloud and expect them to run, even with the best virtualization technology, according to James Staten, data-center analyst for Forrester Research.
To move any significant corporate processing into a cloud environment requires at least the same amount of work IT would have to do to move the same workload from its existing servers to new virtual or physical servers, including reconfiguring connections to network and storage resources, Wolf says.
Keeping track of what happens after the workloads move often means using a completely different set of management applications that integrate imperfectly, if at all, with a company's existing management applications, Laliberte says. IBM, HP, BMC and other data-center systems-management vendors are adding cloud-management functions as quickly as possible in order to try to appeal to customers who have never dealt with them before, Laliberte says.
"A lot of CIOs are interested in internal clouds, but they're leery of the performance issues and security inherent in the cloud environment," he says.
Virtualization leader VMware is also leaping into clouds, basing much of its technology strategy on the idea that companies should be able to virtualize all their IT assets into "internal clouds" that will interoperate seamlessly with external clouds also based on VMware virtualization software.
Both that capability and customers' willingness to go along with it are still in question, Wolf and Laliberte agree.
The best use of clouds would be to be able to move specific workloads from internal servers to a cloud provider when you expect a spike in demand, take advantage of the cloud provider's additional capacity, move it back when the rush is over and pay only for the resources you used, Staten says.
"We're a long way from being able to do that," Staten says. (See Busting the Nine Myths of Cloud Computing).
CIOs on the leading edge of cloud adoption say using an external cloud can make sense, but that metrics and strict controls are even more important in a cloud environment than in a normal internal IT environment, specifically because there are so few controls inherent in cloud-computing relationships. They recommend this checklist of issues to go through before deciding whether and why to use cloud services, which to use, and how. Though the intent of cloud computing is simple, the impact and mechanisms for delivery are often far more complex.
"There's a lot more to it than people often admit," Staten says.
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