Quest for the Cloud

Last week had me working long hours with little sleep focusing what companies really care about when dealing with a Cloud based solution. There are of course many objections, misconceptions, and opinions about whether “Enterprise 2.0” is ready for prime time. Ask any CIO and they can probably rattle off a list of obstacles without blinking – think security, compliance, ROI, reliability, availability, etc. With a laundry list like that, it isn’t surprising why every conversation about Cloud Computing quickly devolves into excruciating detail.

Sleep Deprivation Provides Clarity (Sometimes)

The funny thing about going more than 24 hours without sleep is that your mind focuses on only the most important stuff - it simply cannot handle lots of stimuli  or “noise” like it can when it is fully rested. While not my preferred approach to epiphany, it does come in handy.  While I was working on never ending user scenario documents and  requirements specifications through the night, my mind was subconsciously reducing the problem to its core elements.  By morning, the problem was reduced to four simple letters (or a four letter word if you prefer) - D-A-T-A.

(Keeping in mind the sleep deprivation part…)

Sure, Cloud Computing provides CPU power on-demand and can theoretically scale infinitely, and yes, Google Apps (and the upcoming Microsoft Office Web suite) are truly cool in how they enable collaboration through a browser, and absolutely the social networking aspect many vendors are incorporating into their products provide real value (in some cases).

But the CPU power is required to process data – whether it is an on-demand CRM system or an HR application, there really is no value without that juicy data. Google Apps is a great concept, but until you actually use it for some real purpose, it is just…. “cool”. The real value is in the data created from multiple people collaborating on some content.

Information Is Everything

It isn’t even just the data, but also who (else) can access it. Just look at all the many conspiracy theories about Facebook and the CIA’s access to their data.  This also doesn’t take into account the messages, documents, and pictures people exchange without a second thought to where or how that data is used. The uproar over the difficulty for people to delete their own accounts and personal information from Facebook servers caused a worldwide uproar and the site was forced to amend their policies.

(Hey, even the CIA and FBI  ”get” Social Networking, although maybe not branding or catch-y naming:  their “Facebook for Spies” is called A-Space)

Many will recall that just last month the town of Boseman Montana gained international fame (or is that infamy) by requiring anyone applying for a municipal job  to provide passwordsto their social networking accounts like Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn so the city could ensure you were a “good person”.  You can read about the predictable outcome here.

Even just last week Power.com and Facebook are suing each other over… access to data.

The Big White Elephant

While there is quite a bit of focus on how much Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) costs per hour (starting at 10 cents per hour) or how much the new Microsoft Azure service pricing is for storage (15 cents per gigabyte), the big elephant in the room is even more basic than that – your data is “out there”.

Microsoft has acknowledged that trust will be most important factor in the success of a Cloud Computing as an industry, and ofcourse Microsoft’s own Cloud offerings. In an interview with Ray Ozzie, Microsoft’s chief software architect, he put it quite well:

“Cloud computing is ultimately going to be, do you trust this provider to have more to lose than I have to lose as a company if they mess me up?”

Well put Mr. Ozzie – from way down here, it is pretty simple – enterprises have everything to lose (their data) and justifiably don’t have enough trust in vendors to take on the risks to try for the rewards of Cloud Computing. 

You don’t need to be too sleep deprived to understand that you can give all the free CPU power and software in the world to an enterprise, but whatever value it would provide will never even come close to the value of what the enterprise has today – DATA.

Stay tuned - this onion has a lot of layers to go through…