Cloud Adoption Still Faces The Trust Issue

Despite concerted efforts to set out the benefits of moving IT to cloud-based services, users still stop short of completely trusting those services, according to a web seminar chaired by eWEEK Europe.

“The cloud promises a lot for small and medium enterprises: it lets them cut the cost and compete with big companies,” said Julien Ardisson, COO at German provfider Strato AG, opening The Factors behind Cloud Adoption – part of BrightTalk’s Cloud Summit, a virtual event held on 25 May.

But at the end of the webinar, 56 percent of the audience said they did not believe the cloud was ready to be trusted yet. To be fair, the majority of the audience believed that the problems with the cloud will be solved relatively soon, but listeners proved resistent to the charms of the new IT paradigm. But this was in a group of people interested enough to attend a webinar – in the wider IT world an ISACA survey found that only 9.4 percent would use the cloud for mission critical services.

Hybrid clouds – the way forward?

Everyone agrees on the potential benefits of cloud computing: “The big promise of the cloud is it puts technology back where it should be,” said analyst Clive Longbottom of QuoCirca. “It’s there to make the business more flexible.”

At its best, the cloud can allow companies to escape the constraints of the technology they have had available, concentrate on making business process decisions and simply use what services support those.

But beyond that, users hit difficulties. Firstly, it is not a magic wand, and simply changes old constraints to new relations with service providers. And it may be hard to understand the exact meaning of any given cloud service, although there are definitions – such as one from the US government standards body, NIST, which sets out five types of cloud which can be implemented in three different service models.

Any company’s approach to the cloud is likely to be a hybrid of more than one of these, explained Paul Rivett of CNet training, which has moved some parts of its IT into the cloud while keeping others in-house. “Our main operational software is non-existent within our headquarters building,”  he said  “We’ve put an important part of our IT in the cloud, but not all of it.”

It’s not a technical problem

Although a lot of early criticism of cloud computing has focused on technical issues, such as bandwidth and security, which brought down its predecssors such as ASPs (application service providers) in the dot-com boom, these are no longer the big issues, said Longbottom.

There are technical issues, he said, for instance the latency or the speed of response of an application may mean it can’t easily be hosted remotely, but security should become a non-issue when users compare the security of cloud providers with the true state of their own internal security.

“Use comparative security and compare it with what you really have internally,” said Longbottom. “Most internal security is pretty bad on the whole”

All but the largest companies will find that cloud providers can put in more robust data centres – although the real issue is at what point users decide they can trust them.

And there is also the real issue of regulations, and in particular where data is held and processed: “It must be clear and transparent what happens with the data. This is something the supplier should give the customer,” said Ardisson. Even certain data from the German state of Saxony cannot be held in the state of Alsace, for instance.

Focus on your core

Companies should ask whether they really need to be running a mail server – possibly two for resilience – along with the operating system and email software, said Longbottom – “as well as at least one person to run round like a headless chicken keeping it running”.

He thinks email should be put out in the cloud: “Even though it is mission critical, it is a commodity.” And the same goes for order processing and expenses claims handling. “There is benefit to be gained in doing it more efficiently, but it is difficult to do that when you own the whole stack.”

There are differentiated processes, which make a difference to how well your company does compared with competitors, said Longbottom: “In the pharmaceutical industry, how well does Glaxo Smith Klein manage to get its drug patents through the FDA, compared to Pfuzer?”

But much of that work requires commodity tasks like collaboration and communications: “All that should be exported (safely and securely of course) to the cloud,” he said. “Right at the top you have your unique processes, what makes your company different? That’s where the real investment goes to”.

Despite all this, most people listening to the webinar aren’t ready to move, seeing the cloud as something for the future. IT professionals, it seems, remain to be convinced.