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Cloud buyers: Why it makes sense to think local

One size of cloud does not fit all, says Trevor Pott

Heavy load

If you think I am speaking only of my personal experience, consider that a June 2013 survey of 300 UK CIOs,by NTT, showed that 81 per cent of CIOs believe their existing IT is the greatest barrier to cloud adoption.

This is not to say that none of us could move most of our IT into the public cloud. What it means is that it would be far too expensive to do so.

In the case of my own company (and all of my clients) it would actually cost more than the total company gross revenue.

Some 58 per cent of the survey's respondents believe that it is the complexity of their IT estate that is holding up implementation of cloud computing platforms. Additionally, 64 per cent say that cloud providers assume that existing IT systems are easy to migrate, which is apparently more than a little off-putting.

This makes abundant sense to me. The cloud is unlikely to be more than a tactical tool in my IT toolkit unless I can find local cloud providers willing to work with me on complex problems and strategic investments.

The marketing message from the large American providers is that their offerings are push-button simple. Just turn a few knobs and your company saves time and money. You’d be a fool not to.

Reality intrudes again. The survey finds that 62 per cent of CIOs would adopt cloud solutions more quickly if they were less complex, putting paid to the concept that we are all just a few toggles away from saving money and firing our IT staff.

Our internal IT setups are too complex to move into the cloud – and individual public cloud offerings are often too complex to be worth the time to even try.

Fit for purpose

Interestingly, however, 40 per cent of CIOs agree that cloud computing will unlock their business’s potential, with 49 per cent saying they think it could help them move into new markets.

Think about that for a second. This isn't a bunch of CIOs clinging to the past and pooh-poohing the magical wonder of the cloudy love factories. This is a survey of individuals who have taken the time to analyse the situation and who see opportunity for profit as well as disaster.

Cloudy surveys are the new black, and they return pretty similar data. Everyone has a cloud now and everyone wants you to pay them sacks of cash to use it.

You would expect that if the standard heavily marketed public cloud offerings were such a fantastic deal for everyone, then we would all be jumping in with both feet.

I believe the game doesn't belong to Microsoft, Amazon or Google. They are fine if you are American, developing a greenfield application and don't care about the long-term cost of storage. For the rest of us, I suspect that local cloud providers are going to be far more critical.

Face the facts

Personally, I am looking to my local hosting providers and ISPs, all of whom are getting into the game. "On net" bandwidth from my business to their data centres is a lot less than the cost of peering traffic so I really can use their infrastructure in a cost efficient manner, even if I have to pull down terabytes of data every day to my premises to drive industrial equipment.

If they are local and run a co-lo as well, then I can probably come to some sort of middle-ground agreement wherein I buy servers and storage outright for the stuff that is going to idle or be long-term and I use cloud-bursting on their infrastructure for the rest of it.

The future is the hybrid cloud. Hunkering down behind a fear of change and refusing to consider hosting some workloads outside your own infrastructure puts you at a competitive disadvantage. Putting blind trust in the Big Three public clouds is equally mad.

As ever, taking the time to analyse the available options and fitting solutions to your individual needs is the best advice to follow.

If and when you are ready to start selecting cloudy IT providers, the survey says look to those who will take the time to understand your business and work with you. One size of cloud, it seems, does not fit all. ®

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