Interop: CIOs Eye Cloud With Optimistic CautionInterop: CIOs Eye Cloud With Optimistic Caution

Customers and service providers squared off Thursday over the pros and cons of cloud computing at the Enterprise Cloud Summit panel at the Interop conference in New York City. The session was moderated by TechWeb chief content officer David Berlind.

The panelists' consensus was that the cloud holds big promise for organizations looking to cut costs, boost efficiency, and add flexibility to their IT operations, but significant problems need to be solved before the architecture goes mainstream.

Under cloud computing, enterprises tap applications and services from remote servers maintained by a third party. A number of tech vendors, including major players like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, have jumped into the market, along with startups like Joyent.

Cloud computing's main advantage, advocates say, is that allows customers to effectively share computing costs with hundreds, or even thousands, of other organizations while still maintaining the privacy and security of an in-house data center. "It radically lowers costs," said Don Dodge, developer advocate at Google.

The cloud model also lets enterprises quickly ratchet up computing power as needed, or dial it down—depending on market conditions and other factors. "It's better, faster, and cheaper," said Jason Hoffman, founder and CTO of Joyent. Indeed, Yousef Khalidi, distinguished engineer for Microsoft's Azure cloud OS effort noted that capacity utilization in a typical corporate data center is only about 15%, meaning there's significant waste.

The cloud architecture also offers an accounting advantage in that IT costs can be converted from fixed, capital expenditures to variable operating costs. "You're basically outsourcing your IT infrastructure," said Adam Selipsky, VP for Amazon Web Services.

It's hardly surprising then, that a number of major organizations, including Eli Lilly, Netflix, ESPN, and the cities of Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., have moved a good chunk of their computing operations to the cloud.

Still, not everyone is ready to jump aboard. Interop panelists representing the customer side of the industry voiced concerns about cloud vendors' ability to handle regulatory compliance, security, and interoperability.

John Merchant, assistant VP at The Hartford, noted that insurers must comply with numerous rules around financial, healthcare, and personal data. "How can I be sure you can comply with all those regulations?" asked Merchant.

Similarly, New York State Deputy CIO Rico Singleton pointed out that public sector agencies operate under strict constraints regarding where and how citizens' information is stored. "My concern is from a legal standpoint," Singleton said. "We have some serious legal concerns with the public cloud," he added.

Singleton said state and federal agencies would most likely be more interested in operating their own, private clouds rather than handing off sensitive data to a vendor. Louis Gutierrez, CIO Emeritus for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and for Harvard-Pilgrim Healthcare worried that cloud providers' systems are not mature enough to meet reporting requirements under which many regulated industries operate. He believes "there's a lot that's hugely attractive" about cloud computing, but said he can't fully endorse the model until more effective auditing systems are developed.

"It has to be trust, but verify," said Gutierrez, who suggested that vendors work with industry associations to develop standards that could be used as the basis for industry certification programs. Google's Dodge called the concept "a great idea."

Vendors on the panel conceded that some problems still need to be solved before cloud computing is right for everyone. "There are real challenges moving enterprise IT to the cloud," said Microsoft's Khalidi.

For instance, Khalidi said the industry has not yet developed reliable ways for sharing information between clouds, a situation that would need to be fixed if a state like New York wanted to build a private cloud—an approach favored by Singleton--but still share data with companies and agencies that use public clouds. "We're not there yet," said Khalidi.

And Amazon's Selipsky acknowledged that the technology is not yet in place that would allow vendors to limit the movement of data beyond servers in a particular state in cases where information is legally required to be maintained within its geographic boundaries.

Still, the vendors argued that cloud computing offers enough real benefits at the present time that most organizations should at least consider it for some functions. One approach, said Google's Dodge, is to move low-level data and services to the cloud while continuing to maintain sensitive information in-house.

Dodge told New York's Singleton that his cash-strapped state could save $50 to $100 million per year just by moving its 190,000 employees to Google's cloud-based Google Apps desktop applications. "It's not all or nothing," said Dodge. "Take advantage of the cost savings for the simple things," he said.

Finally, Selipsky suggested the biggest impediment to the growth of cloud computing is not legal or technical, but psychological. The challenge facing cloud vendors is to convince CIOs, a cautious and conservative lot, to hand over their data to an outsider.

"The biggest thing we face is the issue of control," said Selipsky. Noting that even internally run data centers suffer from downtime and loss, Selipsky said tech chiefs mulling cloud services "need to distinguish between the perception of control and the reality of control," he said.

Whether that's enough to sell them on the cloud is an open question. The answer will go a long way in determining if services offered by Microsoft, Google, Joyant, Amazon, and others become permanent fixtures on the IT landscape, or go the way of cloud vendors' early ancestors--the once high-flying ASPs.

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