Enterprise Cloud Alex Bligh


against the long-term benefits of private cloud. Often it is in the interest of those protecting their empire to exaggerate costs and minimise benefits. Secondly, a number of specific objections are levelled against public clouds. Often it is claimed that while public clouds may work for others, this enter- prise is somehow a special case. All have a grain of truth, but can in most circumstances be dispelled.


Objection 1 – Public cloud has inadequate SLAs There are some high volume public cloud services (commodity clouds) that have inadequate service lev- els for enterprise applications. But that does not mean that no service provider can ever provide an adequate and meaningful SLA. SLAs are as much about setting the terms of/and expectations from the relationship between the enterprise and its service provider, as it is about providing a mechanism of obtaining financial compensation in the event of inadequate service.


Objection 2 – Public cloud has insufficient security


Most security problems are not down to technical fail- ings, but are instead due to poor organisational prac- tice. Whilst cloud does present security challenges, many of these are common to private clouds. Service providers have in-house cloud-focused security exper- tise, whereas enterprises in general do not.


Objection 3 – Regulatory reasons prohibit public cloud


Regulatory restrictions do not in general prohibit use of public cloud. Rather, they restrict or mandate spe- cific behaviour, and these restrictions are not in gen- eral technology dependent. It is necessary for service providers to get a deep understanding of what the regulatory restrictions actually are, rather than accept the statement that regulation bans them at face value.


Objection 4 – Applications are required to be in-house for technical reasons


Technical reasons not to use external public clouds tend to fall into two categories: migration and techni- cal properties. Migration costs do indeed exist. How- ever, if a private cloud truly is a cloud, migration costs will be much the same. Service providers can address this objection by providing a combination of cloud and non-cloud services, or simply agreeing that some legacy IT is unlikely to be outsourced until the next technology refresh. Technical properties such as high frequency trading are often inherently unsuitable for


www.cloudcomputingintelligence.com ABOUT THE AUTHOR


Alex Bligh A serial entrepreneur, Bligh has founded or co-founded several successful technology businesses, including Xara Networks, Nominet and co-location provider Redbus Interhouse. He has served on the board of several companies, predominantly in the Internet sector. Previously, Bligh served as CTO for XO Communications Europe and GX Networks. Alex Bligh is now CTO and COO of Flexiant.


January 2013 CCI Magazine


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any form of cloud technology regardless of whether it’s public or private.


Objection 5 – Public cloud is just hype The CIO that states “we can’t put our whole IT func- tion on Amazon Web Services” may have a fair point. However, many of the objections to utilising public cloud technology represent examples of the princi- pal agent/principle problem: the buyer may have a personal incentive at odds with that of the enterprise as a whole.


WHAT ROLE DOES PRIVATE CLOUD HAVE IN THE FUTURE?


Both technological and organisational change is ex- pensive, and moving to public cloud requires both so it is unlikely that all IT requirements will move in one go. Private cloud provides a useful stepping stone to enterprises that are unable or unwilling to move some or all of their IT requirements to public cloud. However, as private cloud cannot capture all the economic benefits of public cloud, and these ben- efits are both ongoing (as opposed to one-off), and increasing as the cloud industry matures, it is a transi- tion technology. Email and digital fax were invented at roughly the same time, but fax carried a lower cost of adoption for many people, and hence was the dominant enterprise technology for digital messaging for many years. But who uses fax now? I suspect the period of usefulness of private clouds will be consider- ably shorter.


Join Flexiant at Cloud Expo Europe in a keynote session ‘The Ultimate Private vs Public Cloud De- bate’ where in this opinion fuelled debate you will hear the main points of my argument and you will hear how other expert panellists respond to these. You will also have the opportunity to debate directly with the panellists.


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