Bad first impression? Give the cloud a second chance

Folks know that with Yahoo Mail, Gmail, and Live (aka Hotmail) accounts, you get what you pay for. The same goes for Twitter, Facebook, and the like. If the services are down, so be it. Just check the company site for more information about the outage or use a service like downrightnow.com to see your consumer service’s status, or report a problem.

But when we slip from free to paid-for cloud-based solutions like Office 365, our expectations are raised, especially when jobs depend on it. Unfortunately it’s very challenging to change a first impression. By now, the words “cloud” and “unreliable” are paired forever in people’s minds.

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As IT pros, we’ve all heard or experienced firsthand the woeful tales of failures and data breaches in the cloud. Amazon, for one, has experierenced some high-profile outages. One of the more recent outages on Dec. 24, 2012, at its northern Virginia data center, its most heavily trafficked facility, prompted an apology from the company (again) because a developer accidentally deleted some key data. Here, Amazon isn’t alone in suffering outages and breaches. Apple’s iCloud was compromised in mid-2012, right on the heels of a Dropbox hack, and the list goes on.

My InfoWorld colleague Ted Samson noted this was a major concern at this year’s RSA Conference in San Francisco, reporting on the nine top threats to cloud computing security, according to the CSA (Cloud Security Alliance). First on the list? Data breaches.

Hosting your own is no silver bullet

Data breaches and outages are by no means limited to the cloud. On-premises deployments have their share and then some. The Open Securities Foundation keeps track of global data loss — and it is substantial. Of course, not all data breaches are reported, and some victims may not even realize they’ve been compromised, as IBM notes in its informational resource for data breach prevention and response.

It comes down to the kind of organization you work with, the sensitivity of your data, and the necessity of ensuring total control over your data. That isn’t to say you’ll be able to provide a more secure environment than a cloud-based solution, but your organization may feel it has a better shot. And decision makers may feel more comfortable putting the security of their data in the hands of someone they know and can interview, shake hands with, look in the eye, and ultimately hold accountable (and fire) should there be a problem.

But for many organizations, the pros outweigh the cons. Hardware is not your problem, nor are upgrades, backups, availability, access, and more. For most cloud offerings, all of this is under the SLA (service-level agreement), and it’s handled for you. The company I co-founded (ClipTraining.com) uses Office 365 for Exchange, SharePoint, and Lync — though I’m an Exchange MVP. I don’t want to have to worry about all the infrastructure, upgrades, and so on that a cloud-based solution can handle for me; instead, I prefer to focus on our core competence, providing high-quality training through online portals.

Blending without the pain of integration

Another reason to consider the cloud is to take advantage of point solutions offered as a service. Many of these, despite the perceived fragility of cloud resources, are aimed at ensuring uptime and business continuity, to provide greater levels of regulatory compliance, to increase your protection against malware and spam, and so on.

Yes, it means spending more money. But the cloud offers a meaningful service: the ability to purchase a la carte from a variety of vendors to mix and match complementary solutions, without having to do the hard work of integration yourself. For example, you might purchase Office 365 licenses for email but forgo the personal archiving solution in favor of a third-party service that provides additional features (we’re currently considering Mimecast’s Unified Email Management) — and it may end up costing you less in the end to pick and choose.

Before you discount the cloud because of the latest headline-grabbing outage, consider the easy versatility services bring. By combining solutions, you may be able to achieve greater control and more stable results blending cloud-based services than you could integrating them yourself. Rather than writing off the cloud and going with first impressions (or second or third), I suggest keeping an open mind and looking for ways to utilize the cloud where possible.

What are your thoughts? What position has your organization taken with regard to cloud-based storage and services?

This story, “Bad first impression? Give the cloud a second chance,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of J. Peter Bruzzese’s Enterprise Windows blog and follow the latest developments in Windows at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.