Analysis Cloud computing holds the promise of someone else taking care of automating your IT, but just because that gives you a fleet of power tools doesn't mean you should throw out your hammer, wrench set and screwdrivers.

An Anonymous Coward comment about a recent article of mine:What you need to know about moving to the Azure public cloud. He said:

“Why bother trying to compare costs if you don't factor in two of the most expensive parts of your infrastructure?

“A basic Azure account gives you 20 storage accounts and each one can have 200TB of storage. The on-prem equivalent would costs you millions. Granted your 100 virtual machines are unlikely to need that much storage, but if you are going to compare cost at least try comparing apples with apples.

“And you missed one of the major advantages of Azure, the ability to automate scale. We turn 80 per cent of our servers off during less busy periods, the process is automated and costs us nothing. We don't pay for the servers once they are off. This is almost impossible to achieve on-prem as you are paying for the hardware and licences regardless of their state.”

This, to me, seems to miss the real cloud amid the marketing message.

If you are designing brand new processes married to brand new applications that are designed to scale up and down as needed, cloud computing might well be as cheap as, or in some rare instances cheaper than, running your own kit.

The rare instances in which it will be cheaper are when your workload is very bursty, seasonal or dynamic.

Consider that you are running a political campaign. You could write all the software needed from scratch, test it in the cloud and then ramp up as the campaign peaks.

After the election you could draw your resources down to just what you need for ongoing data-mining operations. At no point did would you have to buy hardware or lug it around with you.

Idle thoughts

Sadly, in today’s world, the vast majority of the workloads that run in data centres are not set up for this.

What is more, this code represents sunk costs – investments in software that are not likely to be recoded for the cloud. Some applications outright cannot be coded for the way the cloud works.

A large quantity of the world's IT needs to idle, waiting for something to do. When it senses something to do, it wakes up and does it.

This would seem to be the perfect type of workload for the cloud, except that these sorts of "polling" applications are almost always in the form of a Windows application that must run on a Windows Server instance, which is spectacularly expensive to run idle.

You don't pay for what you use, you pay for what you provision

Amazon, Azure, Google Compute and just about every other cloud charges you through the nose for idling virtual machines. With cloud computing, you don't pay for what you use, you pay for what you provision.

Another thing to consider is that whatever the ability to scale your storage, you don't get storage for free: you pay for every single gigabyte. Worse: storage doesn't go away; it accumulates.

You pay for 10GB this month, 15GB next month and 20GB the month after that. You pay for what you use, but what you use next month will be more than what you use this month. The only way this is viable is if your company is experiencing continuous revenue growth. How many companies can say that is true?

What is simply ignored by the hardcore cloud evangelists is that if you own the IT gear, then in times of need you can sweat your assets. Try not paying your Azure bill for six months because an economic downturn made that unfeasible.

Do you think Microsoft is just going to let it slide? How do you control costs on cloud storage in an economic downturn?

The flip side of the coin, however, is that cloud computing is actually quite awesome.

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. ®