On cloud: When to backup & when to build

Today we ask some important questions: is it time for you to backup your cloud? And, should you depend on someone else, or build your own cloud?

A recent blog post on ZDNet says ‘yes’!

Blogger Joel Evans cites personal experiences involving email that might make you think twice:

The first instance involved my wife receiving an invite to view a friend’s photos. It was late at night and she signed [into Gmail] only to wake up the next morning to a barrage of e-mails from her friends asking her if they should sign-up to the same site. Needless to say, she never gave the site permission to search through and e-mail her contacts, but that’s exactly what it did. This was more than a month ago and we’re still receiving acceptance messages from friends who the site e-mailed without my wife knowing.

The second instance just occurred yesterday and happened to a technologist that I know. It seems that hackers somehow got into his Gmail account and hacked through his password, which was made up of a random name and a number. He thinks that maybe a merchant account that he used may have been compromised, but he’s not sure.

In the post, Evans gives users a step-by-step tutorial on how to backup contact lists.

So . . . there are threats out there. Professional hackers. Losers trying to steal your contacts for no reason. Does this mean you should think about building your own cloud?

Reuven Cohen is founder & CTO for Toronto based Enomaly Inc. and blogs regularly about the cloud at ElasticVapor.

He says he gets the question all the time: to build or not to build.

Lately, I seem to be hearing the questions again and again. It seems that for some reason some IT guys have gotten it into their head that if they adopt a cloud infrastructure platform, either hosted or in house, they’re going to lose their jobs. So the only choice is to build it. I think the reasoning is if you build it, you will control it, and your company will have no choice but to keep you around.

This thinking, though, is a bit flawed. Creating your own cloud can often be riskier than relying on someone else’s work — and it might take a lot of time with little ROI.

One such example is a major hosting firm who spent 16 months building their own cloud IaaS platform only to realize that the assumptions they made about the potential cloud market opportunity had changed and their platform couldn’t deliver the technical requirements of their new customer reality. More to the point, their platform wasn’t what their targeted customers wanted to buy. Compounding their problem was the platform they built themselves didn’t actually work – period. The key system engineer left mid-way through the project, forcing the company to find a replacement as well as inducing a major delay in the development. Additionally poor documentation meant those replacements had no practical way to continue what had been started previously. Needless to say, several million dollars later the project did launch, only to be promptly replaced a by a turn key IaaS platform.

In the post, Cohen does admit his bias, since he is the founder of an infrastructure-as-a-service platform, but he also asks an important question — is building worth it, if that’s not your primary mode of business?

Food for thought.

To successfully travel into the cloud, throw out that legacy mindset

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Listen to the entire interview with Reuven Cohen.

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On this Friday, Fed Cloud Blog talks with Reuven Cohen, founder & Chief Technologist for Toronto-based Enomaly, Inc.

Not only does he work in and blog regularly about the cloud, he helped the U.S. federal government to define its strategy for cloud computing — and collaborates with other governments, as well.

FCB asked him about the meaning of the term ‘cloud computing’ to start off our interview, mainly because we’ve found that different people think of the cloud in different ways.

Reuven Cohen: There’s two basic terms when looking at cloud computing. First of all, there’s the aspect of the cloud, which is a metaphor for the internet. Then there’s cloud computing, which, again, is also a metaphor, but it’s more of an analogy in that sense. It’s Internet-centric computing. It represents a shift from sort of the traditional desktop-centric approach to computing, to one that’s a little bit more network- or Internet-centric. So, it’s the Internet as an operational environment.

Fed Cloud Blog: What are some of the advantages of operating on the Web versus having everyone load software on their PC?

RC: One of the big benefits is in terms of capital expenditure. When you’re using someone else’s infrastructure — one that’s remote rather than your own — there’s no big, up front costs. You sort of move from a cap-ex to an op-ex — an operational expense — which is a little easier to manage and much, much more flexible. So, rather than buying a server that may sit under-utilized, you utilize the capacity if and when you need it. It’s a more flexible approach to the aspects of computing.

FCB: Since we are the ‘federal Cloud Blog’, we deal with a lot of federal agencies and federal employees. The biggest concerns we’ve found while doing interviews with people in the federal sphere is that they recognize that there’s cost savings that could be realized through moving to the cloud . . . but everybody also brings up the [issue of security].

RC: The aspects of movement to the cloud is already happening. From the government’s point of view, the Internet has become a crucial conduit for communications, regardless of whether you want to admit that or not. So, by saying cloud computing isn’t going to happen or isn’t happening is just basically sticking your head in the sand.

[W]hat’s good about the current administration is they’re embracing the idea of the Internet as being sort of that evolution of computing — and saying it isn’t perfect. It certainly far from being perfect, but it certainly does solve a lot of problems in terms of broad communications and collaboration.

I think the answer is that it’s not a one-size-fits-all solution. There are certainly areas that are better suited to cloud computing — the kind of low-hanging fruit — and there’s other areas where it it may not be as good a solution. So, it’s picking and choosing the areas that make sense while keeping an open mind.

FCB: [How can one] convince either a supervisor or agency head — “Hey, Software-as-a-Service is great! Or, we should maybe look at Infrastructure-as-a-Service!” Any advice in that area?

RC: Here’s the dilemma that you face — and this is as big an issue with an enterprise as it is in a large organization like the government in terms of the adoption of cloud computing. You’ve got these two basic groups.

In a business context, you’ve got a business group — and they’re seeing the cloud as a way that they can go out and do something quickly and easily without a lot of friction. You know, I can go to Salesforce or Amazon or Google, get my application deployed, built and sent out with relative ease.

On the other side of the spectrum, you’ve got the IT groups that are saying — “Hey now, I want that level of control that we’ve always had,” from the point of view of security and auditability and compliance and all those sorts of things.

So, you get this kind of tug-of-war between these two groups within these organizations: the ones that want control and to maintain the status quo and the other groups that want to do something quick and easy. The two don’t typically go hand-in-hand.

What needs to happen is there needs to be this opportunity to sort of bridge the issue. So the pitch, in a sense, is the efficiencies that allow you to go out and use things that are relatively easy to access from a cloud point of view — I can go get an application that’s built, ready to go without a whole lot of friction — or, from the point of view of compute capacity — I now have the ability to go to an Infrastructure-as-a-Service provider and get access to a thousand servers per hour to get a job done that otherwise I probably would have never been able to do before.

So, it’s the idea of opportunity. It’s the idea of doing something that was never possible before. With that instant access to capacity or services, you know, [it] opens up a whole new variety of opportunities that were never possible.

FCB: Any advice on changing that mindset and helping IT managers to feel better about cloud computing, if they have a problem with it?

RC: The idea of control is one that assumes you’re not going to ignore that the shift is happening. So, if you embrace it, you have the ability to help define it. That’s important. By saying — cloud computing just doesn’t work for us — means you’re ignoring the fact that it’s probably going to happen anyway.

So, by saying it is happening, and there is the opportunity to do things with this type of technology, you can put the procedures in place that help shift how this technology is going to be adopted, rather than just saying — it’s not going to work for us.

I think the opportunities, from an IT group, is to embrace the concept and put those strategies in place to say, if a user’s going to use this type of technology, here’s how we recommend you do it. This is mostly around the idea of best practices, procedures, and — possibly — standards that are in place that help in that regard, rather than just ignoring the fact.

FCB: Different agencies are in different places when it comes to moving into the cloud. . . . What advice do you have for federal agencies that are looking at the cloud but are still unsure?

RC: One of the things I would suggest is not to look at it from a legacy point of view. It isn’t a matter of taking what we’ve done in the past and shoe-horning it into the cloud. That doesn’t make any sense.

The opportunities are things that you haven’t been able to do in the past. It’s looking forward. It’s the things that the cloud enables us to do. The things that we could never do before. It’s those opportunities that you should be looking at — not saying, “Well here’s how we’ve always done it and that doesn’t work in the cloud”. That’s the wrong way to look at it.

I think that you should look at it [like] the glass is half full. It’s the bigger opportunities to do things that were not possible.

Read Reuven’s blog and follow him on Twitter: @ruv. We do!