Cloud Computing: Roadblocks to Adoption

Cloud computing has been a buzzword in the IT industry for long now with everyone talking about potential benefits that organizations can

derive from it. While several software service providers are gearing up their

infrastructure to incorporate Cloud computing, developers have started building

apps that have provisioning for scalability to meet the Cloud computing

requirements. However, key IT decision makers are still skeptical with some

valid concerns to adopting the public cloud for their data-sensitive or mission

critical applications.

What is Cloud?



Cloud Computing isn't a new concept, though it has taken a while for standards, infrastructure and common interests of organizations to meet and result in a commercially viable technology solution. href="http://pcquest.ciol.com/content/linux/2009/109030301.asp">Cloud Computing in general

refers to both application delivery as services over Internet and the infrastructure in the datacenters to provide those services. From a user's perspective, it can be termed as an extension to href="http://pcquest.ciol.com/content/content_ITcareers/2009/109090301.asp">Saas based service delivery

model. Whereas, from a service provider's perspective, it is overhauling the infrastructure to cater to better resource utilization, dynamic provisioning and

auto-scaling capabilities. This new model offers a paradigm shift in the manner

in which applications can be delivered to the users; as it provides elasticity

for scaling up and down the computing resources, thereby offering reduced IT

costs.

Thus, the overriding benefit of cloud computing is that it

enables the service subscribers to only use what they want, and pay accordingly.

As organizations are being more cost conscious post recession, Cloud Computing

is becoming a viable option to deliver web applications.

The Cloud computing spectrum incorporates SaaS as well as

PaaS (Platform as Service) and IaaS (Infrastructure as Service) to fully

encompass the complete definition of Cloud computing. SalesForce.com and Google

Apps (Gmail, Google Docs, etc.)fall under the SaaS model of Cloud computing

where Web-based software applications are delivered. While Microsoft's Azure and

Google AppEngine fall under PaaS category of Cloud computing where you get a

development environment (.NET in case of Azure and Python or Java for AppEngine)

for hosting applications.

Frost & Sullivan survey findings



To understand the changing face of the application delivery market in light

of the influx of Web applications and the rapid emergence of the Cloud computing

concept among enterprises, Frost and Sullivan conducted a survey in Asia Pacific

(APAC) region, which was commissioned by F5.The survey established a strong

association between business agility and Cloud computing. It also highlighted

the key benefit as cost savings for enterprises to adopt the Cloud.

The findings also positioned security and access control as

key challenges that could potentially affect enterprises' decision to either

embrace or discount Cloud computing as a viable business tool at the present

moment. Interestingly, the survey also revealed that whilst enterprise

perception towards Cloud computing as a business enabler was encouraging, but

Cloud computing as a technology remained fairly vague to the majority of

enterprises surveyed. This was confirmed from the survey findings; with almost

50% respondents saying that Cloud computing and SaaS (Software as Service) were

essentially the same thing.

While for the concerns organizations have towards adoption

of Cloud Computing, the survey revealed that majority of respondents,69%,

perceived Cloud Computing as entailing greater security risks. More importantly,

the vast majority of respondents (72.0%) held the opinion that Cloud computing

technology was yet to mature, which was perhaps indicative and representative

of the prevailing market sentiments towards the topic at the moment.

Obstacles to Cloud computing



One of the significant barriers to Ccloud computing adoption is the lack of

a common definition of what the Cloud actually is. If you ask four different

persons, you are bound to get four different definitions of the same. This can

be attributed to lack of standards, or absence of a governing or regulating body

like W3C or IEEE. You can get elaborate definition of Cloud computing on

Wikipedia; though, every explanation incorporates that Cloud computing is about

dynamic provisioning, dynamic scaling, and from both providers and users point

of view, it results in cost effectiveness and optimum resource utilization.

As it happens with any organizational IT decision, the move

to adopt a Cloud model would always be based on sound understanding of

organizational business needs and requirements. Cloud computing market as such

is in an early adopter stage, and with so much of hype and misunderstanding, it

can happen that "Cloud Providers" of today could shift focus or completely shut

down in next few years. Any service subscriber won't like such confusion to

prevail over their adopting to Cloud computing strategy. Coupled with this

unpredictability of service provider, there are perceived risks and

considerations associated with hosting organization's sensitive data, or moving

applications to non-compatible Couds, service flexibility and ability to migrate

to another provider are all posing to be barriers to adoption of Cloud computing

amongst enterprises.

Security concerns



As the survey also reflected, enterprises are primarily concerned about the

security before adopting or shifting to a Cloud based model. It is the

responsibility of the service provider to maintain and address the security

concerns for their Cloud computing infrastructure. The security concerns not

only entail network security but also application security as well.

A hosted application may comprise of services provided from

multiple sources, and the system could have limited capability to identify from

where all the sources are coming. In such a scenario, it can be difficult to

contain Trojans, viruses, worms, back doors, etc. from causing a system outage.

Therefore for service providers it becomes imperative to make considerable

investments towards securing their networks and making them robust.

Information security is a prime concern, with organizations

letting their confidential data being hosted on third party datacenters.

Organizations prefer to have their data within their premise under their own

vigil. And when they host it elsewhere, they are concerned about the security of

their data. For that matter, Cloud providers are looking forward to meet

standards or compliances. SAS 70 Type II (Statement on Auditing Standards) &

Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) compliance are few of the

recognitions for security standards that major Cloud service providers like

Amazon, Google , etc are vying for.

Service availability



Though the existing SaaS service providers have already set high standards

for availability of service, there are concerns for the Cloud based model,

because it is not just confined to application delivery but also to the platform

for computing services, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) model. Any

organization relying on Web based app delivery cannot afford to have service

outage for reasons other than natural disasters. In situations where an

organization is subscribed to IaaS, say from Amazon EC2, it needs to have the

proper resource allocated for the computing-intensive apps that they will

execute on the Cloud provider's infrastructure. This auto-scaling or elasticity

feature of the Cloud is what organizations are keen to capitalize on. Until now

organizations have to build up their infrastructure or subscribe to services

considering the 'what if' scenarios. Most of the times, the resource utilization

comprising RAM, CPU and storage is 5% on average, therefore rendering the

dedicated resource underutilized most of the time. Whereas, with a Cloud

strategy, organizations can capitalize on scalability, both up & down.

Data lock-In concerns



Interoperability amongst various software applications has been achieved

over the years that has resulted in seamless information flow across the

enterprise. But in case of Cloud computing, most of the APIs are proprietary and

lack standardization, due to which applications meant for a particular Cloud

platform can't be migrated to another Cloud vendor. For instance, an

organization deciding to host their business application on Cloud, would have to

spend time and effort developing the app. if they choose .NET they'll host it on

Azure and if they choose Java, the hosting platform will be AppEngine. Once,

they have built their app they would be locked in to that platform and won't be

able to migrate to other platform later. The same concern lies with SaaS service

providers too; the customers cannot easily extract their data or programs from a

provider's site and run it on another.

SLAs and licensing



Service Level Agreements that would incorporate security measures, resource

and service availability and penalty clauses are what organizations want from

the Cloud providers. First of all, it has to be the organization's strategy

decision to decide type of business process and applications they should have

on Cloud and applications they should own on their own. For, example

data-intensive applications like ERP and CRM can be kept on-premise, but

compute-intensive applications like analytics can be hosted on Cloud.

Software licensing is creating a tricky situation for Cloud

providers. Most current software are licensed on the basis of computers it would

be running on. On Cloud, it is not predefined how many computers an application

would need to run upon, it's all about scalability, resources are provisioned

accordingly. So, what basis should Cloud providers charge their customers for

particular software license is a concern for both providers as well as for

subscribers. From the technology aspect, Cloud computing can be enabled, but

from adoption side it is necessary for the Cloud vendors to address these

concerns that pose today as roadblocks to Cloud adoption.

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