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Heads In The Cloud

Submitted by techinc on Wed, 01/20/2010 - 1:57pm
It’s hard to read anything about the state of IT today that doesn’t mention the advent of “cloud computing”. Cloud computing refers to the outsourcing of computing resources to hosting services based at large server farms. Instead of running say, Microsoft Office, on the systems at your place of business you pay a company like Google or IBM to host a similar Office-style suite of applications on their remote servers and you access the applications from your company workstations via the internet. It really is not a new idea and has been around for years in the form of web-based email services such as Hotmail and Gmail. The touted advantages of such services are low maintenance and licensing costs as well as high availability. While the first part may be true and there is some money to be saved by subscribing to such services vs. hosting them yourself, high availability is a promise yet to be fulfilled. This exposes the main drawback of cloud computing and the reason it has yet to see massive adoption - its highly bandwidth-hungry nature. Since the applications being hosted “in the cloud” are not local to your organization, their delivery and performance are utterly dependent on large amounts of reliable bandwidth. And, as most of today’s internet users can attest, bandwidth has yet to become entirely reliable in either speed or uptime. In an organization that has large numbers of users accessing cloud resources or even a small group of users with heavy dependence on cloud-hosted computing, internet connectivity becomes the chokepoint. Large user demand for bandwidth can slow application performance to a crawl while access to the increased bandwidth necessary for the applications to perform properly can be cost-prohibitive. Although cloud computing may yet have its day, it is a technology that needs time to adequately mature, making local hosting and maintenance of such applications still the smart choice.

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