Getting lost in the clouds

Social bookmarking service Ma.gnolia has reported serious problems over the past two weeks resulting in substantial amounts of user data being lost through hardware failures. Hopes of recovering it are slim.
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There is a general presumption that organisations that offer cloud-based services have access to near-infinite pools of computing resources and that these resources are operated to ‘best in class' standards. Of course, the cloud service provider might not actually own all of the equipment. It might work with one of the major data centre experts globally or use an infrastructure-as-a-service provider such as Amazon EC2. Evidently, this has not been the case with Ma.gnolia, a site that many relied on to share and exchange bookmarks, and we should not expect this to be an isolated case.

The assumption of near-infinite scale should never really have been accepted in the first place. Cloud providers have the same investment criteria as traditional businesses, in that they are only able to afford the capital investment required to build out their infrastructure when there are revenues to justify the outlay. Ma.gnolia, for example, was a service delivered on a veritable shoestring, with low levels of IT hardware investment and operational procedures that did not prevent data loss.

Buyers of cloud services need to treat their purchases with the same seriousness as they would treat mainstream IT purchases, unless it is acceptable for those cloud services to have unknown service levels and for them to lose the data that the customers trust to them. Obviously, there are some cloud services where these caveats are entirely acceptable, as not all services need to be on mission-critical robustness.

Part of the traditional buying process for enterprise software and services sees the buyer undertake a degree of technical and commercial due diligence on the provider. For software purchases this has generally focused on the functional fit of the software and the verification that the supplier has the financial strength to continue to deliver product support and further enhancements. For IT services the recipe is slightly different, focusing more on the actual service delivery infrastructure and the processes used to deliver the service. For enterprises, buying cloud services should become more akin to purchasing IT services than to acquiring software products. At present too many treat the acquisition of cloud services as though they are acquiring disposable commodities.

The real ‘take away' from the Ma.gnolia problems is that CIOs should treat cloud services the same way as they treat other IT assets that they use. They need to ensure that they have effective backup and recovery plans for the data held in cloud services, in the same way as they would for on-premise services - whether those backup services are provided by the cloud provider or by the CIO. They also need to test these regularly. They need to have considered the disaster recovery and business continuity provisions - so that the business can continue when a catastrophic failure occurs.

For the CIO to be able to include the cloud services into the broader corporate architecture, the real need is around interoperability. At the simplest level, this means that all cloud services should expose functionality through services, so that they offer integration points. At a richer level, vendors of different cloud services should work together, so that potentially competing offerings can work together and support each other - eg, two storage cloud services acting as a mirroring service.

Ultimately, interoperability around cloud needs to be taken more seriously and offer progressively richer functionality, so that cloud-to-cloud and cloud-to-on-premise integration is seamless and can become part of the standard corporate architecture. Rather than expecting consumers to change what they want and to live with the more fragile parts of the cloud, cloud providers must change to encompass traditional IT thinking.

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BY Ken Lewis
Source：IT BRIEF

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