Moving to the cloud for the right reasons

About two years ago, I suggested the cloud had jumped the shark — not in the sense it had ceased to become an important part of the future of IT, but that the hype surrounding it had reached such a fever pitch that what it means to be “in the cloud” had almost become meaningless. I’ve been surprised to find that the hype has not died down.

If anything, the fact that cloudy infrastructures haven’t experienced the worst of the gloom and doom that initial cloud detractors spread has piqued interest in cloud-based technologies. However, as in the past, nailing down exactly what the cloud is and, more important, how best to leverage its benefits is still challenging for many people.

In discussing the cloud with clients and colleagues alike, I’ve found it’s helpful to look at the full range of cloud-based services available in the marketplace today as a collection of tools that add to — not replace — the on-premise IT toolbox you may already have. I put a great deal of emphasis on selecting the right tools for the job, and looking at the cloud is no exception. Of course, selecting the right tool requires that you have a specific job in mind. Otherwise, you risk putting the cart before the horse in an attempt to bend a problem to fit the solution — a situation that rarely ends well.

Although I believe the cloud is overhyped, there’s no denying the range of cloud offerings available in the marketplace today have amazing capabilities. Tremendous scalability, elasticity, and always-on connectivity coupled with pay-as-you-go pricing are only a few of the benefits you can reap. However, not every IT challenge can effectively take advantage of those benefits. But some can.

A good reason for using the cloud: Dealing with poor WAN connectivity

Despite what the ads tell you, many of us still do not have access to reliable, high-bandwidth WAN connectivity. I spend most of my time in northern New England, and although things are improving slowly, many areas still can’t get much beyond bonded T1 circuits. For multisite businesses or those with many external or traveling employees, this limited connectivity can be a difficult to address. Although deploying on-premise equipment may be easy, providing high-quality access to that gear may not be.

In many cases, you can handle this situation by using cloud services to host parts of the infrastructure that remote sites or traveling workers rely on heavily. That may be as simple as migrating to a SaaS CRM application such as Salesforce.com, or it could mean extending your on-premise infrastructure into the cloud and hosting some of your servers and software there. Of course, the cloud isn’t the only solution to that connectivity problem: Renting space in a colocation facility and installing your own hardware can provide many of the same benefits, although without the scalability advantages.

A good reason for using the cloud: Dealing with poor facilities

As business continues to rely more and more on IT to get work done, the breadth and depth of the applications IT must provide to users has grown substantially. That strains many IT organizations.

The closet that six or seven years ago might have had two servers, a switch, and a firewall sitting on a shelf might now be jam-packed with servers, have inadequate cooling, and put up with limited options for delivering clean power. The thought of investing the kind of capital necessary to build a real server room where one might not have previously existed (or, for larger organizations, expanding an existing one) is often an excellent motivator for finding other options.

Although the cloud can be an excellent answer for addressing such growth, the trials involved in getting there are significant. Do not go in without real research. Migrating even a fairly small environment into the cloud is a tricky process that involves a lot of careful planning to do safely.

Often, smaller organizations decide to partner with smaller cloud providers that can provide first-name-basis personalized support in addition to infrastructure services. Large IaaS providers, such as Amazon.com and the newly announced Google Compute Engine, provide just the infrastructure service. These smaller, more “human” providers can be an excellent option from a support standpoint, but you incur much more vendor lock-in than when dealing with megascale IaaS vendors, which the smaller vendors typically use behind the scenes anyhow.

A bad reason for using the cloud: Dealing with overworked human resources

If there’s one constant in IT today, it’s that everyone seems to be overworked. There always seem to be more projects on the docket than there are people to complete them. For many in IT management, the cloud seems to solve that problem. By moving data center infrastructure into someone else’s hands, you should free up more on-staff IT pros to deal with business data and applications rather than the care and feeding of the servers, storage, and network gear.

In my experience, this is one of the worst reasons to move into the cloud. Although many smart cloud vendors have dedicated a lot of R&D into making it easy for you to spin up cloud-based resources and migrate your workloads into the cloud, that’s not really where the time and investment of living a life in the cloud ends.

As various well-known cloud infrastructure failures have shown, getting your applications to run in the cloud is not terribly difficult. But doing it in a way that is safe, redundant, and secure requires a lot of planning and a completely different skill set than on-premise tech does. Yes, you can farm out a lot of that work to third parties, but then again you could just as easily hire contractors or a managed services organization to help with your on-premise infrastructure.

Adopt the cloud for the right reasons

Regardless of how enticing the thought of not having to worry about physical data center tech or converting much of your capital budget into operational expenditures might be, make certain that the problem you’re faced with can actually be solved by moving to the cloud. The cloud can be an incredibly useful tool, but it can also be the wrong choice for the job at hand. You need to know which it is each time.

This article, “Moving to the cloud for the right reasons,” originally appeared at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Matt Prigge’s Information Overload blog and follow the latest developments in storage at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.