Avoiding the pitfalls of the cloud

By Ville Laurikari, Vice President, R&D, Tectia Corporation

A recent Gartner report predicted that by 2012, 20% of businesses will own no IT assets. We're in the middle of a gold rush to the cloud. In a rush, it's easy to make mistakes, so here's a list of some of the more common errors to avoid when you consider moving your services to the cloud.

“As easy and tempting it is to jump on the cloud bandwagon, hold on for a minute. Are you about to make preventable mistakes when choosing a cloud service provider?”
-Ville Laurikari, Vice President, R&D, Tectia Corporation

Trusting Without Thinking

In IT security, essentials always boil down to trust.  Whether it's a hardware manufacturer, an operating system vendor, or a cloud service provider, you are placing your business in a service provider's hands. 

Moving an in-house service to the cloud may radically increase the number of people and companies who have access to your data.  Previously, you probably had a handful of people in the IT team who had full access to most of your data.  With a cloud service, it can be hard to know how many people can access your data.  Can you trust them all?

Forgetting Backups

Most cloud services claim that your data is secure with them.  In reality, the situation may not be so rosy.  It's surprisingly common for a service provider to suffer a massive hard disk failure, and then discover that there are no usable backups.  Valuable data could be lost forever.  For the most critical data, your company must take responsibility itself and ensure that the data is indeed backed up.

Treating All Data as Equal

Some services are easier to outsource than others.  If you are building your core business processes around a cloud service, it's important that you exercise due care in ensuring that the service is safe and secure.  On the other hand, if you are outsourcing, say, a company restaurant grading service, you may be able to take it easier.

Don't get me wrong, any service accessed by your employees should fulfill certain security standards, but your business probably won't grind to a screeching halt if Marjorie from accounting (second floor, room 15) is unable to publish her glowing review of the mushroom dumplings she had on Tuesday.

Not Preparing for Downtime

The best cloud services are cheaper, faster, and more reliable than a similar service provided in-house.  All you need to do is provide a reasonable sum of money each month.  It seems logical - and easy.

But in spite of the marketing spiel, there is no magic in the cloud.  Cloud services run on regular computers.  The ball bearings used on various spinning bits such as hard disk platters and cooling fans fail regularly.  Backup tape robots break down.  A faulty motherboard catches fire, triggers the fire alarm, and power is automatically cut from the entire server room.  Power is restored in a mere two hours, but two of the critical servers have suffered additional hardware damage and won't start up... you get the point.  Sometimes, the real magic seems to be that these contraptions work at all.

And that's just the hardware.  On top of this, cloud services run software that's more complex than ever before. 

The good thing, of course, is that this absence of magic is not your problem.  Not for the most part, anyway.  But do keep in mind that it's all just software running on bits of wire and spinning parts, occasionally something just won't do what it's supposed to.  There is no computer service on Earth that can truly achieve one hundred per cent uptime, so be prepared for the inevitable downtime.

Letting Your Data be Held Hostage

Most cloud services on the market today are more or less a one-way street.  After years of using a service and populating it with important data, what if you want to switch to a different service?  Technically, the data is yours, but can you get it out?

Google has a dedicated engineering team called the Data Liberation Front, whose singular goal is to make it easier for users to move their data in and out of Google products.  From the Data Liberation Front web page (http://www.dataliberation.org):

"...we always encourage people to ask these three questions before a starting to use a product that will store their data:

    1. Can I get my data out at all?

    2. How much is it going to cost to get my data out?

    3. How much of my time is it going to take to get my data out?

The ideal answers to these questions are:

    1. Yes.

    2. Nothing more than I'm already paying.

    3. As little as possible."

Before implementing a new cloud-based service in your company, you may want to make sure you can pass the litmus test posed by the questions above.

Buying From an Unhealthy Company

Companies come and go - companies selling cloud services in particular.  If you are building important business functions on a cloud service, it would obviously be ideal if that service would be available for years to come.  Don't forget to take a look at the company's health before buying.  A cloud startup may be gone flame out one year after launch, but you're in this for the long run.

Ignoring Service Levels

When you sign up for a cloud service, you probably have some expectations for the level of service.  For example, you would probably like the service to be accessible all the time, and not Available When We Feel Like It which can be all too common in real life.  The contract should define the level of service clearly and unambiguously, as well as financial incentives for the service provider to actually meet or exceed the agreed level.

Ignoring the Cloud

You can also be too careful.  Shying off from cloud services just because you're afraid of the security implications is not a smart strategy.

Don't rush it, but also don't hesitate too long.  Your competitors will take advantage of the cloud where they can, and so should you.