InfoTech
Cloudy future…? by Scott McClenaghan, technical sales and marketing director, NITEC
One certainty is that cloud computing and SaaS represents one of the most potentially significant trends the IT industry has witnessed in many years.
A
longside virtualisation, “cloud computing” really has been the buzzword of the IT industry for the last 12‑18 months. Leading industry analyst, Gartnerʼs, influential “2010 CIO Survey”, carried out at the start of this year, ranked cloud computing as second in their list of top 10 technology priorities.
Their “Cloud Computing and SaaS in 2010” report suggests that the total value of the cloud computing market was $46.41 billion in 2008, growing to $56.30 billion in 2009 and is projected to reach $150.1 billion in 2013. The term “cloud computing” is really a catch‑all term that covers a great many disparate areas but, from the average business ownerʼs point‑of‑view, the “software as a service” (SaaS) niche is probably the most relevant.
It is a little easier to illustrate the concept by use of example so letʼs take company email. At present, most businesses will run a server in‑house to process email to end‑users, which involves capital expenditure in hardware and software and ongoing maintenance.
With SaaS, the idea is that you simply rent an email service from a third‑party provider. The provider invests in the hardware and software necessary to run the service and aims to create an economy of scale through having many customers share that infrastructure. Of course, this idea is really nothing new. Internet service providers have offered email services for many years. These services were, however, typically very basic, providing only email access (no shared calendar or contacts functionality). And it was generally the case that once email was downloaded by the user, it was removed from the server so there was no easy way to facilitate a backup of company email. Most organisations moved away from this type of basic email service and installed more functional messaging systems like Exchange in their own premises. The new SaaS offerings in this area are much more comprehensive and, for the most part, they will replicate all of the functionality that users gain through their existing on‑ premise messaging server.
Users have full synchronisation of their data (with access possible from PC/laptop and mobile device) and the SaaS provider makes provision for ensuring high availability of the service, comprehensive data security and backup policies as part of the service level agreement.
Whilst messaging provision is probably the most well‑
developed offering within the SaaS market, it is by no means the only one. There are offerings springing up in every area where currently locally installed applications are the norm: accounting software, ERP systems, CRM systems, etc. so it is certainly a growth area in terms of the breadth of offering. At face value, cloud computing certainly has some appealing advantages. The aggregation of many users into a single datacentre facility means that providers can build extreme levels of redundancy into their systems through geographical data replication, redundant power and communications links that even relatively large businesses could only dream of. The reduction in capital IT spend and running costs of in‑house systems is another area of undoubted appeal to businesses.
Having said that, there are a great many questions still unanswered. Many organisations struggle with the idea of handing over sensitive data to a third‑party. The more businesses come to rely on their cloud computing services, the more critical their own external communications links become – itʼs conceivable that a business would be paralysed with their broadband down. The quality and timeliness of support in the event of issues is another area that is yet to be tested at a very large scale. With potentially many millions of users operating off the same IT infrastructure, any downtime would have an enormous cumulative impact.
And there is the question of security – those many millions of users would represent an incredibly tempting target for hackers and those who would wish to create disruption. The relative youth of the cloud computing market makes it difficult to make predictions as to the likely long‑term success. Fervent backing and multi‑billion dollar investment from global IT giants like Microsoft, Google and Amazon (amongst others) would suggest that the project simply will not be allowed to fail.
At this stage itʼs difficult to know whether everyone will go to the cloud, few organistaions will make that leap, or we will end up with some sort of mix of the two with some services for some users (teleworkers, for example) going to the cloud and core services for office‑based workers staying on‑premise. One certainty is that cloud computing and SaaS represents one of the most potentially significant trends the IT industry has witnessed in many years.
InfoTech
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