Does the Cloud still look comfy?

By Ivan Schneider
Courtesy of InformationWeek

Leading industry experts respond to gripes that IT professionals have about the security, cost, and portability of cloud computing in the enterprise.

As the popularity of cloud computing is taking off, so have questions and complaints from IT professionals who are using — or considering moving to — the cloud. Industry leaders answer some of the main concerns that they hear from IT staff about the cloud.

Gripe #1: “Wait, this isn’t really infinite, is it?”

One of the big draws of cloud computing is the ability to start small and then go big at a moment’s notice. But this elasticity should not be mistaken for infinity.

“It seems infinite, but it absolutely is not infinite,” says Imad Mouline, CTO of Gomez, the web performance division of Compuware. “In some circumstances, you may not be able to get the instance that you want, the data center or availability zone that you want, or the kind of instance that you want.”

You may be exposed to operational risk if your business depends upon being able to provision any level of cloud resources at a moment’s notice. “Are you willing to bet your business on it?” asks Mouline. “Or are you taking a chance that on the day that you need to ramp up that you’ll have the capacity and that you’ll get to it quickly, in hours instead of days?”

If several heavy users of cloud services simultaneously have the same idea to scale up, you may end up

Read More →