5 Things that Should Never Go Into the Cloud (1)

Unless you’ve had your head in the sand (or in the clouds?) for the last few years, you’ve been hearing a lot about cloud computing. The “public cloud” is the name given to a collection of servers and services that are hosted in data centers that don’t belong to you and aren’t on your premises. The “cloud provider” who owns and controls the servers can provide a number of services, typically divided into the following categories:

• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
• Platform as a Service (PaaS)
• Software as a Service (SaaS)

IaaS, PaaS and SaaS have their own distinct advantages and disadvantages.

Note:There are many other definitions and descriptions of cloud computing. The “private cloud” is a term that refers to company-owned, on-premise datacenters that use the same technologies (such as virtualization) that cloud providers use. In this article, we will be talking about the public cloud.

The most common vision of cloud computing is that it provides an on-demand, elastic computing resource that can be provisioned and de-provisioned automatically to meet the need of the consumer of cloud computing services; the end result is that the purchaser of cloud computing services receives a “metered service” and only pays for what is used.
Sounds pretty good, eh? Think about it. Your company isn’t an IT company, and your core competency isn’t in IT or information services. Why are you maintaining your own datacenters? Wouldn’t it be better to outsource the management of the IT services you need to run your company instead of trying to maintain them yourself? If you outsource your computing services, you can move the dollars you spend for capital expenditures to operational expenses, and this smooths out your balance sheets, gives you a more predictable cash-flow pattern, and you don’t have to make a big capital outlay for what quickly becomes “yesterday’s technology.”

This is why so many people have their heads in the cloud these days. They claim that IT is “growing up” in the same way that public utilities have evolved over the years. It’s more cost effective and more reliable for a central power company to manage the delivery of electricity to cities, compared to having each home maintain its own generator. The same goes for water and gas utilities. Why maintain your own propane tank and water well when the utility companies have the expertise and financial resources to provide a highly available, world class service?

With “growing up,” however, comes growing pains. There is still a lot of distrust of the cloud in the business world, and for good reason. Probably everyone who’s reading this article has lost some important information at some point in time, because you trusted some online service to store your data and keep it always available. In our family, one of the worst experiences we had with this related to MSN music. When MSN music went away, all the songs that Tom and I had bought from the service over the years were no longer playable on any machine other than the three that were authorized – and there’s no way to unlock these songs, so as these machines got old and died, that music became completely unavailable.

Thus, while there are some great things that the cloud can do for you, there are also some things that you need to be very careful about when you start thinking about a cloud strategy for your organization. In this article, we’ll look at five things that I consider to be too important to trust to the cloud, at least as it exists today.