Confessions of a cloud skeptic

At long last, after a couple of years of obsessive coverage by trade rags and analyst firms, I think “the cloud” has jumped the shark. We’ve been inundated by stories declaring that cloud infrastructure will mark the end of cap ex for IT — and almost as many articles labeling the cloud as an unreliable, underpowered security nightmare. Is anyone listening anymore? If you ask me, this dog has had its day.

Frankly, I’ve never seen what all the fuss is about. When I first started hearing rumblings about cloud infrastructure a few years ago, I actually thought I might have missed some huge technological development. It didn’t take me long to figure out that at a very basic level, cloud infrastructure isn’t new at all. It’s the marketing and spin that’s new.

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Web hosting providers have been around since the dawn of the Internet as we know it. I consider them the first widely adopted purveyors of cloud infrastructure. They offer hosted, multitenant software and a hardware architecture that charges on a subscription or per-use basis like a utility. Just about every enterprise with a Web presence — small or large — uses a hosted Web provider to serve up its public face rather than taking on the responsibility internally.

Of course, there’s more to IaaS (infrastructure as a service) than that. With the rapid maturation of server virtualization and the development of multitenant virtualization platforms, cloud infrastructure providers can now support just about any kind of compute requirement. Entire multitier application architectures, VDI, huge swaths of storage — it doesn’t really matter what it is anymore. The technology is there to shove it all into the cloud and make it work. That’s certainly a far cry from simple Web hosting.

But it’s not really the quantum leap everyone seems to think it is, either. Cloud infrastructure providers are just doing on a very large scale what some enterprises have been doing internally for nearly ten years — mainly, server virtualization, where you migrate your physical infrastructure to a virtual infrastructure. If done correctly, this usually results in huge capital and operational cost benefits and increased scalability and reliability. The cloud extends this model and moves it outside the walls of your enterprise. A tremendously different cost and support model, certainly, but nothing particularly new from a technology standpoint.

The security and capacity challenges that cloud infrastructure providers face aren’t really new either. Having dealt with many Web hosting providers — and having run one myself in a previous life — managing available capacity, making sure clients’ business data is secure, and providing responsive support have been problems from the get-go.

So I suppose the really new thing is that, instead of just offloading something relatively simple like your Web presence or email to a hosting provider, you can now conceivably shove your entire IT infrastructure — support and all — out the door. But does anyone really think that’s a good idea right now? Honestly?

I don’t know about you, but I’ve learned not to trust almost anybody in this business farther than I can throw them. Can anyone who has run moderately complex IT infrastructure for a few years say that they haven’t been seriously let down by an IT vendor (hardware, software, service) at some point along the way? Usually, it’s just a single piece of equipment or application that might be affected, but in this case you’re potentially talking about the whole basket of eggs.

The key to navigating the cloud — just as with any other service or technology — is to approach it in a careful, balanced way. Just as with an externally hosted Web presence, IaaS and SaaS (software as a service) will be the right answer in some cases. It will very rarely be the right answer for everything, sometimes because the cost model isn’t there and sometimes because the security or availability risks may be too much for your organization to bear.

My bottom-line advice for potential cloud customers: Never get so dug in that you can’t quickly pull up stakes and move things to a different provider or back internally if you need to.

As time goes on and “the cloud” matures, the technology and standardization required to move an entire multiterabyte enterprise infrastructure from one cloud provider to another may well emerge — eventually. Until then, hapless folks who hope to turn their entire IT infrastructure into an operational line item will be sorely disappointed. Fortunately, I think the number of suckers who fit that description have dwindled. The hype has peaked.

This article, “Confessions of a cloud skeptic,” originally appeared at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Matt Prigge’s Information Overload blog and follow the latest developments in data storage and information management at InfoWorld.com.