I had the good fortune of being asked to emcee the CDM Media CIO Cloud Summit last week in Scottsdale, Ariz. Honestly, I could attend a cloud computing event every week, if not two or three. Many of these events are the typical vendor showcase where I get briefed all day by the tech vendors and cloud service providers. That’s why it was so refreshing to spend two days with a big group of CIOs, CTOs and other IT leaders—with minimal vendor pitches—and just talk cloud. What I appreciated about the summit was that IT leaders for both large multinationals and small businesses were among the attendees and presenters. It was a microcosm of the market for cloud services and showed how diverse the needs are, how far the cloud computing industry has come, and how far it has to go.
An example of the difference between large and small business was evident in the two opening presentations. To kick things off, Phil Shelley, Ph.D, CTO, Sears Holdings Corporation, a $43 billion company, discussed Sears’ migration to private cloud architecture. Following Phil was Hilary Croach, CIO, Bay Cove Human Services, a small, non-profit human services organization with a total staff of 1,600 people. These two organizations could not be more different, but the one thing they have in common is they’re all in on cloud computing.
Dr. Shelley’s message to the attendees was that if they are going to build a private cloud, it has to be competitive with public cloud offerings. This absolutely makes sense for a large firm such as Sears Holdings. They have the resources and skills to build a private cloud that can provide the same features and price as a public IaaS vendor. The fact that Sears Holdings can use all open source tools to build their private cloud helps them be price competitive. Another key message from Dr. Shelley was not to underestimate the skills of your IT staff. In his words, “Strong Linux/Unix administrators with a desire to learn and drive may be all you need to start.” He also pointed out that fear of a skills gap may exceed the actual skills gap and could be used as a convenient reason to avoid getting started. I saw a lot of heads nod, and I believe this is the case in many companies. Inertia is a powerful thing. Respondents to the Yankee Group 2011 US FastView: Cloud Computing Survey cited existing investments in IT infrastructure as the No. 1 obstacle to cloud computing adoption. Dr. Shelley showed confidence that enterprises can use open source software and teach their staffs new skills to build an open source private cloud that can be more secure and price-competitive with public IaaS providers.
In contrast to Sears Holdings, Bay Cove Human Services can’t hope to compete against a public cloud services provider. But having Bay Cove follow Dr. Shelley was actually quite brilliant. A lot of audience members couldn’t fathom building a private cloud that could compete effectively with public IaaS providers. And it’s a huge concern since they all acknowledged that unauthorized purchases of cloud services are a reality. But making Bay Cove’s story interesting is not just the fact that it uses public cloud services and finds them more cost-effective. It’s the fact that it uses Google Docs for document sharing and collaboration in a highly regulated health care environment.
Data protection and security is recognized as the key benefit of a private cloud. Yankee Group’s surveys bear this out and Sears’ Dr. Shelley confirmed that it is a major factor for his corporation. For Hilary and Bay Cove, building a private cloud was simply not an option. Bay Cove needed a way to use Google Docs while complying with industry regulations such as SOX, HIPAA, FISMA, etc. To accomplish this, Hilary and Bay Cove set very clear policies for document sharing and used CloudLock to manage and monitor document sharing and permissions. I like the Bay Cove example because I very often hear public cloud services being held to a higher security standard than existing data centers and technology implementations. As Hilary pointed out, “There is no such thing as perfect security; it’s about doing our best to mitigate the risk.” Bay Cove mitigates risk with detailed access and sharing policies and data protection tools that provide manageability, access control and auditability.
So the message of Day 1 was validated by our FastView Cloud Computing Survey: The argument about public vs. private cloud is dead. Companies of all sizes understand the use cases of each, and use of one or the other comes down to your available resources balanced against your ability to mitigate risk.
Some other random show observations:
- Application modernization is a huge obstacle. Every attendee pointed to legacy applications as the biggest barrier to using cloud computing. Their businesses rely on existing applications that are just not architected for virtualization and sharing other software and hardware resources. It’s the most costly and time-consuming task when migrating to virtual environments and eventually cloud.
- PaaS is still not ready for prime time. Few, if any attendees were using PaaS. When asked why, attendees pointed to the potential to be locked into a platform and the lack of a full feature set in most PaaS tools. They felt that PaaS tools were useful for green field projects, but migrating existing applications to a cloud platform was the higher priority.
- Organizations need to value relationships, not just customers. Great presentation by JP Rangaswami, Chief Scientist, Salesforce.com: “Sharing and Social in Business: Why it Makes Sense.” The bottom line is that enterprises have mastered the ability to value a customer. We can measure what each customer costs and how much revenue they contribute over their lifetime. But enterprises need tools to value relationships, networks and interactions in the same way.
- Assessing compliance claims is a nightmare. No shock there. Public agencies, law firms, health care firms and retailers were all in agreement that compliance is an issue but an even bigger issue is assessing a service provider’s claims about compliance. Until they can understand just what level of compliance a service provider can offer, they are staying in-house. It may be a while to evolve but cloud service providers that target specific verticals could evolve to cater to the needs of heavily regulated industries.
After the two days I spent among these CIOs and CTOs, it’s obvious that IT gets a bad rap. The image of IT leaders as insecure gatekeepers is fun but no longer accurate. Judging by the formal and informal conversations I had, IT managers are focused on the interests of their users and their organizations. It’s a difficult job to protect and promote the best interests of each. They all see cloud computing as a way to accomplish that but want the vendor community to recognize just how challenging it is.
SOURCE