Put your head in the clouds

The cloud is being touted as the next big breakthrough in computing for organisations today. CXO sits down with two industry experts to discover the main issues and challenges surrounding this technology.

“Many companies start using AWS by launching a new application or service in the cloud, and they can use their chosen programming language and tools to do so”
-Werner Vogels

Industry experts talk of the cloud being the next big breakthrough in computing. What difference can it make to organisations in terms of operational efficiency and profitability?

Werner Vogels. Amazon Web Services significantly improves the productivity of enterprise IT organisations by allowing them to focus on their products and services rather than on infrastructure. It is an unspoken truth that doing the heavy lifting of running IT infrastructure does not differentiate organisations from their competition. Rather than waiting for time consuming hardware procurement and purchasing processes, businesses can quickly and cost-effectively requisition storage and compute resources in the AWS cloud and reduce time-to-market. In addition, using AWS can reduce their IT spend. As the number of applications running in our cloud increases, the operations, management, and hardware costs to Amazon are amortised over more users. When we enjoy the economies of scale, we pass those savings onto our customers in the form of lower prices. By using AWS's infrastructure services, organisations can thus focus their energies on adding value for their customers.

Piet Bil. Some have called cloud computing the 'industrialisation' of IT delivery for an organisation. Just as the telecommunications industry has industrialised delivery of telecommunication services, where one's ability to make a telephone call is fully automated, the delivery of IT in support of a particular business function workload is automated so the end user is in control.

The infrastructure has been built out with the automation to manage the environment and reduce the human interactions required. Both of these actions can have a dramatic effect on IT and business operational efficiency, and by getting to market much more quickly this can have a dramatic impact on profits as well as reducing expenses associated with delivering the IT-enabled services. This type of efficiency can be achieved across any workload that can be automated for self-service, self-management by the end user including support, analytics, storage solutions, business processes and many more.

How real is the vision for cloud computing for the average organisation today? Are we set to see a mass migration of IT functions toward external suppliers?

PB. Cloud computing is very much in the early stages of deployment. Organisations today are beginning to explore the opportunities that cloud computing presents, yet also identifying the challenges a self-service, self-managed IT deployment will have on them. What are the risks associated with data management and recovery, security, resiliency, as well as meeting with key regulatory requirements especially with regards to data privacy. In that cloud computing is a delivery and acquisition model of IT-enabled services it can be in-house resources or external suppliers that deliver it. A recent study by IBM, as well as independent analysts, shows that as much as 60 percent of organisations today prefer "private" cloud delivery versus acquiring from external suppliers, many of whom may be an unknown entity. The vision of cloud computing is very real, the migration to a cloud computing deployment is real. But a mass migration to external suppliers is not practical today.

WV. Cloud computing is real and it will continue to grow as a viable alternative for in-house infrastructure. Today, companies ranging from small start-ups to large enterprises, across all industries, are leveraging the AWS cloud. We have hundreds of thousands of registered developers to date and this includes a broad spectrum of companies around the world, ranging from young, technology start-ups like Animoto and Playfish to established companies such as Eli Lilly, National Geographic, The New York Times Company, NASDAQ, and ESPN. We also have a growing partner ecosystem, which includes companies like Oracle, Sun, My SQL, IBM, Red Hat, and CapGemini.

What are the implementation challenges for companies looking to adopt cloud computing? 

WV. Many companies start using AWS by launching a new application or service in the cloud, and they can use their chosen programming language and tools to do so. But as companies wish to utilise the AWS cloud more fully, they often need to migrate existing IT applications - many of which weren't written to take advantage of the cloud or horizontally scale. Or some of these applications have dependencies on other internal applications that need to move to the cloud too before they can function correctly. We typically see organisations run a proof of concept to get a sense of what it's like to run in the cloud. We provide additional guidance through our Cloud Architectures whitepaper on utilising AWS features specifically designed to increase reliability and availability, such as regions, availability zones, elastic load balancing and auto scaling. Understanding these features can help users architect fault-tolerant applications in the AWS cloud that far exceed what most organisations can do on their own, with lower cost and faster implementation.

PB. Challenges to adoption of cloud computing tend to fall into three main categories ­- operational, risk management and business. Within operational the challenges are how to best enable the self-service, self-management for the end user. Virtualisation, service delivery automation and usage monitoring are all key to addressing the operational challenges of delivering a cloud enabled service. The number one barrier to cloud computing is the security and protection of the data or risk management of cloud. Risk is also associated with the assurance of privacy of the data, and even more important the resilience or recoverability of the data in the event the environment goes down. Finally, business challenges require a review and updates to existing business processes as well as business attitudes may be required. It is very important to understand and address the impact and benefits of the change on the people within the organisation.

Does the cloud computing have any implications for data backup, security and compliance? How can these concerns be allayed?

PB. Data management and security are the biggest concerns to cloud computing. To address these concerns organisations must be able to assure that the environment will be secure from internal and external attacks. To address security the key areas that can and should be addressed include: governance, people identity and access management, data protection (including resiliency), application and processes, network and endpoint security, and finally the physical security of the environment. IBM is leading the way in addressing the concerns about cloud computing with software and services offerings that take into account each aspect of operational, risk management, and business challenges associated with cloud. Additionally, for any services provided on the IBM Cloud, we are addressing these issues by providing environments that are secure, resilient, and compliant from a cross-industry standard, and we can work with an individual organisation that may have their own unique regulations they need to meet.

WV. Questions about security are the most common concerns we hear from CTOs and CIOs. At AWS we give customers the tools to make sure their data is secure and acknowledge that their data remains their property, we're simply very skilled caretakers. We have full-time staff dedicated to security, from policy development to incident response. At Amazon we have developed expertise over 15 years managing our global and secure infrastructure. Our scale has allowed us to make significant investments to build a shared-services infrastructure with the same degree of isolation you'd expect in a private data centre; furthermore, we've engineered automatic multi-site replication into our storage services to simplify business continuity plans. We realise businesses are coming under increasing regulations and we strive to build services that allow organisations to remain in compliance. For example, our customers can achieve HIPAA and PCI-DSS Level 2 today.

THE EXPERTS

Piet Bil is Vice President, IBM Global Technology Services Benelux, responsible for all technology services business, which includes sales and the portfolio towards the market and the delivery. Prior to this, Bil was Managing Director of the Philips and NXP account worldwide. His experience in IBM spans financing, global business services and global technology services in several executive roles. 

Dr Werner Vogels is VP & CTO at Amazon.com where he is responsible for driving the company's technology vision, which is to continuously enhance the innovation on behalf of Amazon's customers at a global scale. Prior to joining Amazon, he worked as a research scientist at Cornell University. Vogels holds a Ph.D. from the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam.