The Cloud is Dead! Long Live the Cloud!

The last two months have presented several large “black eyes” for cloud computing. In March, access to Google Apps (including Gmail) was interrupted for over 136,000 users. Last month, 13% of Amazon EC2 and RDS customers in the US Eastern Region had a complete service outage, affecting a range of well-known companies.

As a result, the cloud computing pundits have brought out the knives, attracting a lot of questions regarding the readiness of enterprise cloud computing. The gist of all of these arguments is that cloud computing is not something for mission-critical enterprise applications.

Many cloud computing advocates have countered these attacks by citing reliability statistics. For example, Google’s outage affected 0.02% of users for five days. This equates to 99.9997% up-time on an annualized basis—a statistic far better than that achieved by nearly all enterprises.

The Cloud: Dead or Alive?

Sunrise or Sunset?

So who is right? Is cloud computing “dead” for important use?  Or is cloud computing better than anything enterprise management teams can provide?

They are both right… and both wrong.

How can this be true? A simple reason: enterprise (or business) computing is not simply provision of processing cycles or storage; it is a provision of a full range of computing services: systems engineering, processing, storage, customer service, technical support, backup and recovery, etc. It not simply a commodity transaction, but instead an ongoing business relationship managed by a human being and bound by service level agreements.

Those that view cloud computing solely as remote provision of computing resources are missing “The Big Picture.” Cloud computing is a service model for delivery of computing infrastructure, platforms and/or software. Those who wish to be successful providers of cloud computing for business need provide everything an internal enterprise computing provider would provide: computing resources and managed computing services—at higher quality and lower price.

The Cloud is Dead

This is why “The Cloud is Dead!” Companies who only provide remote processing cycles and storage are not providing enough for mission critical business use. They are simply providing the asset side of the equation—minus the controls critical for enterprise survival. Many of these providers—especially after the last two months—will soon be “dead” to enterprise buyers.

The Cloud is Alive

However, this is the very reason I say, “Long Live the Cloud!” The recent cloud computing problems highlight the huge market demand to add systems engineering, customer service, technical support, backup, recovery, and other human-oriented services to the cloud. (Imagine the benefits that businesses can gain by being able to “rent” the entire range of services and infrastructure their Internal Computing departments currently provides—but working from a more efficient, higher reliability infrastructure.) Cloud providers who meet the combined demand for lower-cost/higher-reliability computing AND managed services will make cloud computing a reality for big, mainstream enterprises—and do so very successfully.

The New, Complete Cloud

The nice thing—for business enterprises and cloud providers—is that there are so many ways to do this. Cloud computing providers can augment themselves with professional services teams, becoming “all in one” providers. Or they can remain focused on what they do best and partner with IT service providers who already have staff on hand and established procurement relationships with enterprises. Just imagine the ecosystems of cloud provision we will see arise over the next few years, competing with each other to provider better technology and service at a better price.

The Old Cloud is Dead! Long Live the New Cloud!