Disadvantages of the cloud and how to overcome them

One of the cloud’s primary promises is that it can liberate organisations from the limitations of traditional IT infrastructure. Here, Oracle’s Marc Caltabiano argues that early cloud solutions have created a new kind of computing silo, one that again imposes limits on organisations. He suggests that organisations must take a more nuanced view of the cloud to get the most from a cloud strategy.

We are currently witnessing an inflection point in enterprise computing.

Several growing trends are indicative of this shift, namely: a move towards rapid adoption; standards-based, service-oriented applications; user interfaces with embedded business intelligence and collaboration; pervasive enterprise mobile computing; and cloud computing.

According to a recent report by Frost & Sullivan, there has been a huge spurt in the number of Australian companies adopting the public cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) delivery model within the last 12 months, with almost half (49%) of all cloud computing users surveyed trying IaaS. Faster broadband internet, as delivered through the National Broadband Network (NBN); the emergence of warehouse-sized data centres; and political willingness to embrace and promote cloud services are pivotal factors in shifting broader cloud computing concepts into reality in Australia.

But while the market has been abuzz with news about the potential of the cloud, it is really more an evolution of sorts for enterprise businesses, one where the cloud is moving from boardroom conversations to reality. At Oracle, we envisage the journey to the cloud as a phased one.

From niche SaaS to holistic business alignment

Early software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions were designed to offer a single function or service a single line of business, with little thought to how they would support an organisation’s broader business objectives. Today, the proprietary legacy architectures, immature integration technologies and limited solution footprints of niche SaaS vendors have generated multiple cloud silos that limit the ability of organisations to fully reap the benefits of cloud computing.

Standalone SaaS solutions found in the market ironically limit businesses rather than liberate them. They establish data silos, fragment business processes and create integration complexities that introduce new long-term costs and risks and limit worker productivity. These problems undermine any efficiencies that could be gained through the cloud’s virtualised and shareable infrastructure.

Evolutionary journey to the cloud

Taking an evolutionary rather than revolutionary approach, many organisations have consistently explored opportunities to strengthen their existing technology infrastructure to ensure they become a better internal service provider for various lines of business and organisational departments. Clearly, the objective has been to provide greater agility and responsiveness to business needs, higher quality of service in terms of latency and availability, and lower costs and higher utilisation.

Organisations have realised that their data centres still have dedicated silos, where each application runs on its own middleware, database, servers and storage. Each silo is sized for peak load and therefore there is a significant amount of excess capacity built in. Each silo is also different, leading to complexity and high costs to manage.

Organisations are today moving from these silos to a grid or virtual environment with shared services, dynamic provisioning and standardised configurations or appliances. The majority of the companies I talk to are engaged in some form of consolidation, though they may be doing this in only a portion of their data centre.

Rise of private and hybrid clouds

Many organisations will further evolve to a self-service private cloud that offers the same flexibility and incremental cost advantages to end users as public clouds, but with less perceived risk and greater assurances of security and accountability. This idea is gaining increasing acceptance among large organisations. According to a survey conducted by a leading analyst firm over 40% of close to 1000 organisations surveyed reported plans to implement some type of private cloud in the next few years. Similarly, a recent survey conducted among IT and data managers/professionals with the Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG) found that adoption of both private and public cloud formations is up. 30% of respondents reported having limited-to-large-scale private clouds, up from 24% only a year ago. Another 25% are either piloting or considering private cloud projects. Meanwhile, more than one out of every five respondents had adopted public cloud services.

We believe public clouds will continue to mature and eventually create a potent mix of private and public clouds, a ‘hybrid cloud’, which will run a single application, managed in a federated manner, through a ‘single pane of glass’.

Elasticity and scalability

Elasticity and scalability are key features of the public cloud. Elastic expansion and contraction keep resources in line with demand. Even if an organisation opts for a private cloud model, it can still benefit from these capabilities.

For example, in a cloud bursting scenario an organisation might run the steady-state workload on the in-house private cloud, on hardware and data centres owned by the organisation. But when there’s a peak in the workload (such as at the end of the financial quarter or ahead of the holiday season), it can dynamically burst out to a public cloud and take advantage of that capacity. When the peak is over, the business can return that capacity back to the pool and shed that cost. We think cloud bursting is still some way off in the future, but it certainly is very compelling. Organisations that have adopted service-oriented architecture (SOA) in their data centres will be in a better position to take advantage of cloud bursting.

Security

Organisations have ranked security, privacy and regulatory compliance as their top concerns around adoption of cloud computing technology. Cloud security is a complex, multidimensional issue ranging from questions of data protection and privacy, application availability and identity management, to compliance and legal issues, such as protection of intellectual property, as well as record-keeping and data retention requirements.

Things to consider before moving to the cloud

While a move to cloud computing can bring huge operational and financial rewards, it is a complex task and requires careful planning. Here are some suggestions for organisations that are embarking on the cloud journey:

• Integrated application-to-disk platforms speed up the ability to exploit cloud computing and reduce business and technology risks.
• Virtualisation is a key enabler of cloud computing, but managing clouds is another crucial element. Managing all virtual machines and clusters is quite complex, especially with self-service, multitenancy, metering for billing/chargeback and other requirements of cloud computing. To reap the full benefits of cloud computing, organisations need to choose the right management solution.
• It is imperative for organisations embracing the cloud to take an approach where security pervades the entire architecture rather than being bolted on as an afterthought. Organisations should not only look at products with best-of-breed security in their respective categories, but also products where security mechanisms are well integrated, enabling ease of deployment, ease of change and high reliability.
• In order to reap maximum business benefits from a hybrid cloud approach, customers must adapt middleware technologies that will seamlessly bridge the divide between private and public clouds and help them continue on their path of business agility and transformation.

Conclusion

As customers look to further reduce IT costs by hosting shared services, consolidating workloads on fewer physical resources and lowering IT administration costs, evolving from a grid to a cloud platform will become more prevalent.

Organisations will evolve through these basic stages at different rates of speed and will occupy several stages all at once. In other words, organisations will leave some stable legacy applications in a siloed mode. They will consolidate other applications to a virtualised, grid environment. And for some types of applications, they will move to a full self-service private cloud and, ultimately, to a hybrid cloud model. All of this will take time, as we are still in the early days in the evolution that is cloud computing.

By Marc Caltabiano, Senior Director, Enterprise Architecture, Oracle Australia and New Zealand