Cloud Computing Not the Answer for Every Busines
Some Applications Ill-Suited to Running in the Cloud
Dec 11, 2008
Cloud computing refers to the practice of running business software applications on someone else’s network. Instead of buying its own servers and running software on them, a company contracts with a third party vendor that provides them with the computer processing capacity they need at the vendor’s data center. The computing capacity is available as needed, much the way electricity is provided by a utility.
Amazon, Google, Sun into Clouds
Amazon was one of the first companies to offer cloud computing through its Elastic Compute Cloud service. Salesforce.com, which began selling sales force automation software as a service, has expanded to offer a range of applications using a cloud model. Earlier this year, Google launched Google Apps to not only develop software but run it on Google’s massive network.
Sun Microsystems is the latest entrant in the cloud competition, offering to host applications on a network of Sun servers and storage hardware running Sun’s Solaris operating system or on virtual machines running Windows or Linux. Sun officials spoke about the company's cloud strategy to reporters at a meeting in San Francisco on Dec. 9, 2008.
Startups ‘Not Buying Servers’
Cloud computing is ideal for small-to-medium sized businesses or startups lacking the capital to build their own data centers. “Startups today are not buying servers,” says Lew Tucker, chief technology officer of Sun’s Cloud Computing business. “Sinking a lot of money into equipment right now is not the right thing for them to do.”
Cloud computing gives a business the flexibility to buy computing capacity as they need it, scale up when demand spikes, but also scale down when demand subsides. But businesses need to be careful how they venture into cloud computing, Tucker says.
Sensitive Data not Cloud-Worthy
Security-conscious businesses are rightly cautious about running applications using sensitive data outside their firewall. A company that stores customer credit card numbers or other financial information, or a health care company that handles patient files, should think twice about running such applications in the cloud.
“I think the closer you get to very tightly held data, which has a lot of policy and laws around it, the less suited that is for doing in the cloud,” says Tucker.
Data intensive applications are better suited for cloud computing because they use a lot of computing cycles, says Dave Douglas, senior vice president of Sun’s Cloud Computing unit. Examples would be data analytics, finance or high-performance computing.
Any Web-facing applications, such as an e-commerce site, would be ideally suited to cloud computing because they’re already based on a Web interface, Douglas added. And standard business software such as CRM or inventory control could be done in the cloud.
Before going to the cloud, businesses should also consider how important high availability is to them. How would it affect their business if the cloud-based service was interrupted? What kind of service level agreements does the cloud provider offer to guarantee a certain percentage of uptime?
Also to consider is how the provider charges for cloud service. Some programs charge a monthly fee, a per-minute fee or charge by the amount of compute cycles the client uses. If an application is little used, a monthly fee might not be the right approach because they’d be paying for time when the application sits idle.
On the other hand, if a company pays per compute cycle, the charges would fluctuate with usage, but it’d only be paying for the times when the application is used.
