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2009 will be the “Year of the Cloud,” pundits predict. It has a nice ring to it, but cloud computing — that nebulous way to provide IT infrastructure on the cheap — appears to have come up against a very solid barrier. Internet-based infrastructure services like EC2, Amazon.com’s Elastic Cloud Computing offering, aren’t yet able to sign the service level agreements (SLAs) companies need to entrust their largest, most core computing tasks.
Soon that may change, say analysts and CIOs.
Cloud computing cuts costs dramatically, by allowing customers to share offsite servers, virtualizing, allocating and paying for them as needed. That works great for startups, especially those who provide a retail-type service online. But for companies with mission-critical computing needs and mature software-as-a-service providers, the cloud, for all its elasticity, can’t provide the necessary customization and SLAs.
Cloud computing has become a valuable service to power business intelligence, but companies have held off with more critical functions like enterprise resource planning applications, said Curt Hall, a senior analyst with the Arlington-based Cutter Consortium analyst group. “We’re just concerned that Amazon and the other cloud providers can’t really handle the enterprise yet,” Hall said. “Maybe they can, but we’re not sold on it yet.”
Boston’s Visible Measures Corp. uses EC2 as an extension to its in-house data center. The cloud supports development and serves as a backup in case of a massive failure or a sudden demand spike that exceeds its servers’ capability.
But the SaaS company’s core function, tracking video use and sharing across the web for advertisers and content publishers, processes too much data to rely primarily on Amazon, officials said.
“We need to have very, very fine-grained control on data collection,” said chief software architect Christopher Gillett. If Visible Measures’ instance on EC2 is colocated next to another, that other instance might be using the cloud of computing resources in a way that negatively impacts Visible Measures’ ability to process data.
“We need to have the machines up and running, we need to know what they’re doing, and we need to know what the network around it is doing and who’s using it,” Gillett said.
Tom McGovern, a senior account executive at Hosted Solutions LLC, which operates a data center in Charlestown and sells hosted server options against services like Amazon, said he has heard similar concerns about the level of control over infrastructure resources that exist as instances in the cloud.
“Customers are coming to us and saying we can’t get (service level agreements), and we’ve got very limited flexibility in terms of what we can do in this hardware,” he said.
However, Gillett said cloud computing has come a long way since Visible Measures decided to build its own data center in early 2007. Amazon has now introduced persistent storage at the node level and other data warehouse-like services, he said. If Visible Measures were launched today, they might have invested less in their data center, he said.
Hall, the Cutter analyst, said cloud computing providers need to meet their customers halfway in order for widespread adoption to occur.
“At some point, the cost-benefit is going to override the concern,” Hall said. “But then it just comes down to killer (SLAs) and how much can we modify it to meet our business processes so we aren’t changing our own business processes to fit their system.”
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