Last week, I once again found myself at an HDI conference. This time, it was HDI 2013 in Las Vegas. As usual, I was excited to be among the best and brightest practitioners and thinkers in the IT industry, including Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak who was a keynote speaker.
While there, I verified that security isn’t the biggest issue with ongoing pubic cloud operations. Portability and interoperability top the lists of those who’ve “been there, done that” with cloud computing.
Let me be clear. Security, including compliance and privacy concerns, is the number one issue for determining if you should move that application or service to the cloud in the first place. So, once the risk-reward decision is made, security becomes “table stakes” and is no longer the main impediment to success. Simply put, if you’re worried about security and can’t seem to solve it, the data or application probably doesn’t belong in a public cloud.
Assuming that risks are reasonable from a security point of view, your biggest issues will probably be portability and interoperability over the mid to long term. Portability means being able to move workloads, data, and configurations to another provider.
Obvious portability issues arise when the provider changes its policies or prices or goes out of business. If you have lots of data or generate lots of transactions, how can you get that data out?
Providers have little incentive to help you leave their service. Your provider isn’t going to burn you a DVD, and all your data probably won’t fit on one anyway. How long will it take to download or FTP your data — especially when it continues to grow all the time? You need to plan for portability well in advance of your cloud migration.
Interoperability means sharing data or management between cloud providers, integrating multiple cloud offerings or integrating cloud services with legacy apps, ops, and data centers. Interoperability is especially an issue when business units go around IT.
Here’s an example: sales and HR opt to go around IT due to cost and time to deliver. Perhaps they each set up SaaS services without consulting each other or IT. Months later, they want to integrate databases from their services with data from the enterprise data center, but the two services aren’t compatible with each other or the data warehouse. They go to IT and ask for a fix, and there isn’t one that makes sense. Then one or the other decides to change providers… and now we’re back to the portability issue.
Portability and interoperability combine to create a vicious circle. So security is the gating factor in deciding to move to the cloud or not, nothing to minimize. Once you’ve made the decision to go cloud, you need to understand and mitigate the portability and interoperability issues you will face before you actually move to the cloud.
Since most business people won’t think about this issue, you’ve got to help them make good decisions up front. The job of IT is shifting from “installer and maintainer of systems” to “broker and communicator.” Add value by helping those considering cloud services make the best choices.