“It is also why we are talking more and more in terms of ‘workloads’ and services rather than the infrastructure — or at least the market is — and realising that however powerful and comprehensive public cloud is all businesses are different,” McMahon says. “They may look superficially similar, sector and size and so on. But it’s like fingerprints — each one is unique at the detailed, practical level. That is why we are all becoming conscious again of elements like physical networks. Some workloads demand high performance, not unlike the well understood Quality-of-Service priorities of voice and video traffic, while others operate fine at general and somewhat variable Internet speeds.”
To give an idea, of the three billion or so transactions per day on Salesforce.com about 50% are API calls — about half of the traffic on our service is from other apps or services interacting with it, Carl Dempsey, Salesforce
The cloud is no longer vanilla, McMahon says firmly. “Service providers like us have to offer a portfolio of services and the customers want to build up a suitable mix of the services they require. That inevitably leads to the transfer of workloads around services from time to time and a telling symptom is that clients are looking more and more for a defined exit strategy when taking on a cloud service if they are to have confidence in it.”
Clear niche market
That more mature and better differentiated cloud market is a very healthy one for companies like Telecity Group, which sticks broadly to its heritage as a managed services provider with its own set of European carrier-neutral data centres. “We are seeing a very clear niche market emerging in private or dedicated cloud — and niche does not necessarily mean small — for enterprises that for whatever reason are still uncomfortable with what we still call public cloud,” says Scott McConnell, Telecity director for emerging markets.
Some of that is conservatism, he acknowledges, but in other instances it is a reasonably well-grounded fear of being non-compliant with sector regulations from PCI to Sarbanes-Oxley to geographical limits for data. “In fact the payments processing business, a fast-growing sector, is simply not ready to move to the cloud to any great degree. That may change in time, but it’s a significant characteristic today and working from a data centre that is PCI DSS compliant simply sidesteps potentially huge paperwork and audit hours and so on.
“In that sense one of the things that we sell is accreditation as a key part of the service in data centres and private cloud. If you don’t have the certification there are swathes of business for which you simply are not eligible,” McConnell said. “But it suits us and our industry, in fact. We can build private cloud environments for customers, which are effectively dedicated hardware resources in the data centre. If they then want to use public cloud as well, perhaps for certain workloads or simply a temporary requirement for testing or extended capability, we can offer specific secure access models. Our new Cloud-IX service offers direct connection to the world’s leading cloud providers from all of our data centres. In this new cloud market of alliances, it is a benefit to us and our business to be able to offer these connections.”
Enabling
Accenture, predictably, takes a balanced view of cloud that respects the technology and its advances but is perhaps more concerned with what it enables organisations to accomplish. “CIOs today are looking more at their business problems and opportunities with cloud as just another ICT tool or resource that could be used,” said David Kirwan, head of technology in Accenture Ireland.
“That is also why hybrid solutions are now so common. If my organisation has ploughed a lot of investment and resources into, say, a global ERP system tailored to its precise needs then this new cloud thing has limited appeal. But as new apps come along, or new business issues that drive such new apps, then of course I will look at how cloud services can contribute and integrate with our existing systems resources.”
In fact the payments processing business, a fast-growing sector, is simply not ready to move to the cloud to any great degree. That may change in time, but it’s a significant characteristic today and working from a data centre that is PCI DSS compliant simply sidesteps potentially huge paperwork and audit hours and so on, Scott McConnell, Telecity Group
So far there has not yet been any general rush by larger enterprises to put mission critical applications in the cloud, in Kirwan’s opinion. “On the other hand, when we are talking about e-commerce cloud is effectively the default, whether on public like Amazon, Microsoft Azure or Accenture, not least because so much e-commerce is natively Web/Internet anyway. Email in the cloud is now very common and Salesforce.com has been the SaaS exemplar for years. Cloud-based HR solutions, like SAP’s SuccessFactors, or various e-sourcing services, exemplify a newer breed of trusted cloud application services.”
Security, in all its aspects, was the first and continuing concern about cloud computing by organisations — even as consumers rushed into its embrace. “It is fair to say that the position has effectively reversed, with most of cloud services definitely more secure than traditional systems because of the sheer investment and technical effort that has been put in by the cloud providers,” Kirwan says, “although I suspect it will never go away completely.”
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