Cloud Computing – An Introduction

Cloud Computing – An Introduction
Cloud computing has become the latest hot topic in IT circles, and promises a paradigm shift offering users lower cost of entry, scalability and utility computing (Pay as you go) without the upfront infrastructure costs. With these advantages companies can become more agile, take advantages of new opportunities, or old opportunities may now be more viable. IT departments are able to deploy capability faster to meet the needs of the business.
Cloud computing is not new it has been with us for a while. What is commonly credited in raising its profile and giving it mainstream adoption by companies is the increases in internet bandwidth reliability, maturing of the hosted environment and the mainstream acceptance of internet usage by private individuals, companies and local and central government departments?
Internet Bandwidth
Internet bandwidth has increased to levels equivalent to locally connected PC’s 10 to 15 years ago. The reliability is so high that losing the power is more likely than the network connection. This has then offered business reliable and performant connections allowing people to work away from their traditional desk. They are now able to work from home, other offices, customer sites or on the move with the infrastructure to housed in a central location. Cloud computing would not be effective if the connections were slow and unreliable.
Internet Hosting
Internet hosting companies have matured now and their advantages are costs, reliability and security. They are able to build a robust and secure environment and get many users to fund it. Interoperability of technology has increased driving down the maintenance and configuration costs. An example of this is the introduction of virtual machines: the ability to run several machines on a single box. This enables the same hardware costs to manage several different servers. It also enables easy backup, restore and in particular server creation, which enables capacity to be increased quickly – on demand. Cloud computing could not exists if it was not possible to quickly, easily, and cheaply create and maintain servers.
Internet Technologies
Finally the internet technologies have matured, standardised and been developed to support the cloud. This has given developers a common environment to develop applications for a standard interface, the applications developed will sit on a standard infrastructure, and the way they communicate with each other has been standardised. These established standards have developed as more and more applications have been developed in the same way, they may all have different functions, benefits and uses but they all benefit from advances in the hosting environment, and these benefits can be passed onto businesses in the form of lower up front costs, utility computing (Paying for what you need), and the technology agility to expand and contract, and take on new applications as the market demands. Most large software providers are embracing this model; Microsoft, Google, Amazon, BT
Applications that have a common data structure are suitable for the cloud. A ‘pure’ cloud application would enable a company to purchase the software in a utility/usage pattern. Their data would be held in a single database along with all the other users. Companies that require ‘bespoke’ applications to provide competitive advantage are not suitable for the cloud.
The above details why and how ‘Cloud’ computing has come about, and started to look at some of the benefits. Let’s look at some examples where it could be used and where it is being used:
The home user
Currently my daughters each have a laptop. They mainly use the browser for ‘Face book’, music, pictures, and if I am lucky homework! It has become a vital part of their life and when it is not working causes me considerable stress trying to get it fixed. They never backup their data, and never seem to have a memory stick with the right data on it to do their home work; “I can’t do that because the file is at school”, and I bet they say the same to the teachers, “I can’t do that because the file is at home”. One option would be to purchase a cheap net book and a subscription to ‘Google’ apps. This would provide them with the following applications; email, word processor, spreadsheets, and presentations. They advertise it as anytime anywhere access. Now this seems attractive to me. Google will, for a low annual fee, take care of backups, security, virus protection, and even file transfer (There is none because all you need to work is a browser and an internet connection). This sounds attractive. Plus I do not have to do, or pay for, any more upgrades!
Small business user
Now these benefits are directly transferable to a business. It is possible to start a company with a minimal amount of IT costs. Even the telephone system can be in the cloud. A friend of mine setup his own sales/marketing Company, and has one of the best contact processes I have seen – he is always contactable. He uses ‘Skype’ as his telephone exchange (This is function rich and used by some very large companies), his mobile receives voicemails via email, and he can configure Skype via the browser on his phone smart phone. He uses Google applications so can access from any client site, he has multiple client calendars that sync to one Google calendar. He advertises using Google Adwords, when the prospects visit his website enquires are channelled via call-back technology to his blackberry. He effectively runs his business in the cloud leaving him free to work with clients and reducing infrastructure costs and delay.
Corporate user
A large building industry company have switched to email delivery of their invoices, statements & credit notes using a secure web based service which is scalable from 100’s of paper based documents per day to millions per year. They process more than 1,000,000 Emails in this way integrated with SAP, and their CRM system. They are saving 80% on their previous invoice costs.
Having looked at some examples let’s now look at the key opportunities made possible by ‘Cloud’ computing:
Cost Savings
Currently the main business opportunity is one of cost saving, which will be achieved from running standard application and servers in the cloud.
New Business Opportunities
There are new businesses appearing that require unpredictable amounts of processing and storage. The cloud offerings enable these businesses to start with minimal capital expenditure and have the agility to expand with demand. Examples of this are where a large number of users, or data need processing for a short time: elections, concert ticket booking (try booking for Glastonbury) and oil exploration (they get a large amount of data that needs processing in a short period). In all these examples the businesses could use utility computing and only pay for what they need. The ‘promise; is that you no longer need to purchase the computers to cater for the maximum plus 30%, but instead you can rent this in the cloud.
Multi-Sourcing
The other opportunity is that the cloud technologies enable companies to specialise in smaller parts of the business process. This will then lead to companies being able outsource smaller parts of their business process – multi-sourcing. The opportunity then are for companies to offer this outsourced capability and for companies to use these new capabilities to improve their service, cut costs, or even offer new services.

© 2010 Biztech Forum – Expert Group – Cloud Computing
David Gibson – Transition Computing Ltd.
Henry Kafeman – HDK Solutions Ltd.

The cloud – Is it living up to its promises?

What is the cloud?
Before we begin reviewing whether the cloud is living up to its promises it is important the reader understands what a cloud based application is. Many people have different explanations a sample from Wikipedia suggests it is:
“Cloud computing describes a new supplement, consumption, and delivery model for IT services based on the Internet, and it typically involves over-the-Internet provision of dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources. It is a byproduct and consequence of the ease-of-access to remote computing sites provided by the Internet. This frequently takes the form of web-based tools or applications that users can access and use through a web browser as if it were a program installed locally on their own computer”
To make it easier for the readers to understand here is a diagram showing how a cloud based application would be accessed:

Cloud Computing

The cloud promises:
• Lower costs
• Reliable access to your cloud based software
• High speed access to applications and data
• Secure access to your data
• Easy to share / collaborate with your peers
• Improved Disaster Recovery / Business Continuity
At this time we are personally aware of over 300 business professionals using the Microsoft Cloud solution in their every day work lives. The decision to switch to a cloud based offering is different for each organisation that employs these 300 people; however all of the reasons come from the list shown above.
We think the best way to deal with the promises is to answer each one individually.
Lower costs
Cloud solutions tend to be able to demonstrate low costs with the deployment of the technologies and the on-going operational costs, if we make a simple comparison using the Microsoft hosted Microsoft Exchange solution against purchasing your own Microsoft Exchange server it is clear to see the initial cost is significantly lower as you don’t have the costs of the server hardware or server licensing, you simply have a per user per month cost.
It is fair to say that if we compare cost of implementation of the two solutions for a start-up business you will see a reduced cost by opting for the online solution as the IT vendor doesn’t need to configure the back-end server infrastructure. In some cases you can also see a reduction not only in the hosted software license costs but also in the support you receive from your IT vendor as they no longer need to maintain the Exchange server infrastructure.
Reliable access
With locally installed applications some business owners fail to replace ageing server hardware when the manufacturers warranty has expired, leaving them in a vulnerable position. Companies also regularly overload their local servers to avoid having to purchase additional servers or make the investment in costly upgrades, this short sighted approach to developing and maintaining a local server infrastructure can lead to a problematic environment. Cloud based offerings are typically designed with high availability in mind and a large amount of redundancy built in.
Most hosted applications tend to offer 99.9999% uptime which still equates to nearly 4 ½ minutes per month of downtime. However, given the various issues a SME or even a corporate can have with their IT infrastructure it is sometimes difficult for them to guarantee this type of availability with locally installed equipment unless a substantial investment has been made in high availability / business continuity.
There have been a few high profile outages with some of the more common cloud solutions; on September the 3rd 2010 Microsoft experienced a 90 minute outage with their Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) solution affecting most of North America. (Source zdnet.com)
On the 14th of January 2011 Google changed their customer agreements to say there will never be downtime again relating to their hosted applications so offering 100% uptime (Source theregister.co.uk).
Not only do we need to consider the cloud provider but also the customer’s own connection to the cloud. Leased lines are incredibly reliable but for SMEs with low cost DSL circuits they don’t have the benefits of 4 hour fixes, instead they could face a 4 day fix if their internet connection goes down. 4 days without internet could mean 4 days without access to your cloud based applications.
We think it is fair to say for some customers, that they would have a more reliable experience when using hosted applications rather than local servers. But for others with problematic internet connections or who have chosen a poor cloud partner they might be worse off, so reliable access is maybe a promise not always kept.
For those who cannot afford lack of access due to any internet connection failure, it is possible to pay for redundant internet connections. However it needs to be clearly understood how independent these really are, as some may in fact depend on the same backbone. With cloud solutions being provided worldwide and even able to migrate depending on demand, understanding actual connectivity and redundancy becomes complicated.
High speed access
When moving an application to the cloud many people worry about the speed at which the application may perform. Typically this is one of the things the vendor always thinks of first and they design high speed web front ends to access the data in the back end and this approach can sometime improve the performance over a traditional locally installed application. If a customer were to opt for a Virtual Desktop Interface they may even see the same applications delivered in the same way (using an application client rather than web client) but because it would be hosted on a high speed ultra reliable cloud infrastructure they could see an improvement in performance. The biggest issue you find with Cloud offerings and speed tend to fall outside of the hosted application providers remit, instead the problems come down to poor connectivity from the customer to the internet giving the end user a poor experience of the cloud package.
As BT continue to rollout fibre to the cabinet and improve the infrastructure across the UK this problem is being alleviated. But if you are a client looking to switch to a cloud based offering but your main offices are in a rural area with poor connectivity options, then speed could be an issue. The only way to resolve that would be to move or invest in higher cost technology which may make a cost driven decision to move to a cloud solution no longer viable.
The cloud can deliver higher speed access to applications and data for remote or even head office based staff, but only if the provider has optimised the application and the customer has made the right investment in connectivity
Secure access to your data
Data is the biggest asset a company has, so securing their data is vitally important to any business. The cloud provides a mixed offering with regards to security.
Most cloud based applications use encrypted connections typically delivered over an HTTPS connection; however there are some applications which do not use secure connections and so could be monitored across wireless networks as the traffic is unencrypted. Further to this, tools such as the Firesheep packet sniffer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firesheep ) could potentially allow people to review content users are accessing across the internet, thus making a large amount of cloud offerings security systems worthless.
As there are no recognised cloud security standards enforced upon all providers of services, it is also very difficult to confirm the provider you are working with has the internal processes and systems to properly protect your data from outside attackers or even the supplier’s staff. There are of course many established professional companies who provide a secure offering but we do feel some providers don’t give you the right level of security and all businesses should look hard before confirming which provider should host their data.
Another consideration is any legal aspects surrounding where the actual data is located in the cloud. Unless Service Level Agreements (SLAs) pin down allowed locations, the data could end up in any international jurisdiction.
Easy collaboration
The Biztech forum membership is made up of individuals who do not work within the same company or the same location, so a cloud solution is the only way we can share information around the group without constantly emailing files around which could lead to versioning issues or even just email overload.
The Biztech forum use a cloud based intranet portal to provide updates on events within the group, Microsoft have made Sharepoint available online making it easier to collaborate with your peers and there are many more cloud solutions which improve productivity between groups of people.
We have not seen a single instance when a cloud solution, when properly implemented and used, has not made a drastic improvement to the productivity within a business. The key though is to ensure the solution is implemented in the correct way and the user base fully understands the processes they need to follow to allow them to work efficiently within the application.
Improve Disaster Recovery / Business Continuity
A cloud based offering that has been properly designed and is offered by a trusted provider typically has a large number of redundant paths. The providers offer such high SLAs that they tend to be very reliable (excluding some recent incidents noted earlier in this document).
Within the SME community it is rare for businesses to have the available funds to make the right investment into disaster recovery / business continuity (DR / BC); with a cloud solution you almost have an out of the box solution. In the event of a disaster affecting your main premises such as fire or flood you can send your employees home to work or take a short team lease at a service office company and be back trading within days.
The major downside you have when looking at cloud solutions and your DR / BC planning is the provider themselves. Very few people consider that cloud based application providers need to make a very high investment in technology to make these applications available to the customer base and a lot of these suppliers can be start-up businesses with no trading history or cash reserves. In the current climate you should also consider when looking at your DR / BC Plan what happens if my cloud provider ceases trading. If you’ve opted for one of the larger players such as Google, Salesforce or Microsoft it is unlikely you will ever have an issue with the provider, but if you are using a smaller business it might be worth keeping an eye on their trading performance.
Overall we have investigated cloud solutions for mission critical applications and found the level of service offering lacking. It can deliver, but SLAs vary and typically do not guarantee uptime, backup of environments, etc. The assumption is that the infrastructure will protect your critical data, but what happens if the data itself becomes corrupt?
In summary
It is unfortunate the UK telecoms circuits are not yet in a state that we can deploy high speed internet connectivity for every UK business. If we could then many more could consider making the switch to business applications published in the cloud.
When the UK telecoms companies do make the right infrastructure available to all UK businesses, we believe the new players in the cloud market will have refined their offerings, resolved many of the issues highlighted in this document and cloud solutions will become the best choice for many businesses.

© 2011 Biztech Forum – Expert Group
Paul Tomlinson – Mirus-IT Solutions Ltd.
Henry Kafeman – HDK Solutions Ltd.
David Gibson – Transition Computing Ltd.