Among other revealing questions, the survey asked respondents from enterprises that had already engaged in server virtualization if there were aspects of the process that made anyone in the organization feel less than confident in the process of placing these mission-critical applications in the cloud. An overwhelming majority reported that some at their organizations did have just such concerns.
Seventy-six percent of respondents reported that some had security concerns about the virtualization, and an equal number reported performance worries. However, it was reliability that was the number one concern, with seventy-eight percent of respondents reporting jitters about data availability and uptime.
These concerns overwhelmingly came from C-level execs who may or may not have a clear grasp on the practical realities of server virtualization. Symantec's survey found that the IT personnel at these same companies reported, for example, 78 to 85 percent completion of performance goals. It's not IT, however, that writes the checks or green-lights the virtualization process, so there's much to be done yet to reassure the higher-ups and iron out very real security, reliability, and performance concerns that persist.
Down Time
After all, stories of the cloud gone awry are easy to come by and, rightly or wrongly, give all cloud a bad rap.
Amazon Web Services, the cloud's 800-pound gorilla, sports a history of reliability that's nothing to sneeze at, but its EC2 outages drew far too much press attention to be easily dismissed. Furthermore, Amazon admits that data was permanently lost in the outage. And while the amount of lost data (0.07% of the data on the company's US-East Region servers) doesn't amount to much, relatively speaking, but is certainly enough to give the already-skittish pause. After all, what if that data had been your data? It could include sales history and contacts, valuable code, or simply precious memories that were thought to be safe and secure, protected from on-site data loss.
And Amazon is certainly not alone. Microsoft has had its share of issues with its Office 365 productivity suite, leading the snarky to dub it "Office 364". In addition, Salesforce.com, often held up as one of the poster children for a cloud concept that works, has its share of online detractors who blast the service for downtime and unscheduled maintenance.
Cloud providers can go a long way towards assuaging reliability fears with proper SLA management. Typical service level agreements for cloud providers offer guarantees of 99+ percent uptime, with partial service credits available if those benchmarks aren't met. In Microsoft's case, their outage in the UK brought their uptime below their touted guarantee (marketed at 99.9 percent), leading the Advertising Standards Agency (ASA) to investigate complaints from customers who called the software behemoth's marketing misleading. So these claims are taken seriously and bolster customers' intrepidation to move to a cloud environment or entrust a third party provider to manage their cloud infrastructure.
However, it's worth remembering that no on-premise server is immune to crashes or downtime, either, and the redundancy offered by cloud storage or other cloud computing and virtualization offerings may help to avoid many types of permanent data-loss or frequent server downtime. At least, in theory.
Keeping Clouds Within Reach
However, one of the problems with clouds is that you have to be able to reach them and they are only as good as the (third-party) connectivity upon which they rely. This places a great deal of faith in the last mile, which is not always up to the task of allowing access to mission-critical applications. As a recent Ovum report points out, a crowded hotel full of business travelers all attempting to use wifi to access a key application or bit of sensitive data creates the sort of bottleneck that stymies cloud efforts, even if the servers are working at a tremendous clip.
And this is an area in which the CSPs can leverage their network know-how to create a reliable cloud offering that may be beyond the abilities of some of the other major cloud players. Ovum notes that Portugal Telecom is among the providers who view the cloud-motivated ongoing need for bandwidth on the access network as a business opportunity that stems directly from the cloud push. And for CSPs who have been particularly active in marketing their cloud services, from BT to Tata, the ability to offer both the reliable access network and the cloud services to which that network allows access is a considerable advantage.
