Where Can Things Go Wrong?
Moderator: Greg Ness, Marketing Executive, Infoblox
Panelists:
- Peter Coffee, Director, Platform Research, salesforce.com
- Randy Rowland, General Manager, Managed Hosting & Cloud Computing Services, Terremark Worldwide, Inc.
- Geva Perry, Founder, Thinking Out Cloud
- Bill McGee, Vice President, Products and Technology, Third Brigade
Panelist Points of View on Cloud Computing:
- Greg Ness – Networks, resources and monitoring
- Randy – Enterprise Cloud Platform offering
- Peter Coffee – Salesforce
- Bill McGee – Security perspective, private and public cloud
- Geva Perry – Bigger picture, Thinking out Cloud blog
Some highlights from the discussion follow…
General comment:
Peter – the problem of the cloud is anything being offered with price tag of zero, while some things are being offered with a price commensurate with the value. Look for the latter.
Critical Cloud dependencies:
Geva: lock-in, security (although often same issues exist in enterprise). Want to consider who will eventually become hub of ecosystem, look for that player. Geva has related blog post. Ease of integration.
Bill: Cloud vendors (IaaS) will need to offer basic, and higher levels of security. Higher level – physical, server, management console – is for customers (enterprises) who value security more [business requires stricter security]
Peter: Amplifies first two answers, ease of integration and strong security. More integration, more trust comes into play. Peter says in multi-tenant environment, everyone benefits from the security strictness of the most demanding customers.
Randy: Reliability. Mistake people make is assuming just because something is in the cloud means it is backed up somewhere, on a cluster, provides business resilience. Unless building brand new app that doesn’t need access to anything on premise, need to understand, plan for connectivity. If you are looking a cloud computing as answer to enterprise IT needs, need to really work contract, compliance, know you can survive an audit. All can be overcome.
Peter: Conversation shouldn’t be “cloud is not secure, won’t use it” or “cloud can’t integrate, won’t use it”. Need to say, if going to the cloud, what is cost for our level of security, or integration. Typically, people find the additional cost is not significant. Cloud ends up being viable solution.
Geva: Lock-in, the more things are limited and specific to vendor, tightly knit, more “perfect” the solution is for the thing it was built for. Specialized, easy to use. Trade-off with lock-in.
Security – different solutions emerging to solve issues. Not necessarily from the big cloud vendors, but from the ecosystem players. Cites enStratus as an example. Important to consider the niche players.
Stark differences between standard IT and cloud services:
Randy – agility, how fast can IT respond to the business. Business will go directly to SaaS providers for solutions. [Shadow IT threat story]
Peter – Two ways to mess up: (1) non-enterprise class SaaS solutions adopted by business in silos (2) re-create traditional IT environment and practices in the cloud; need to do something in the middle.
Bill – understand if existing software has access points to be successful
Geva – automation increases self-service, adds to agility story for enterprise
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