It's monsoon time again and raining clouds

Yes, it’s raining, and the country is covered with rain clouds for which everyone is thankful; after a year when everyone was worried. It’s as if the economy’s slowdown and lower budgets had a link with the reduced rainfall. You must be now wondering about the relevance of monsoon for a CIO. Please have a bit of patience for the ‘Oh I See’.

Someone is launching a book on the support models and delivery on a specific cloud (amongst the oldest service offerings globally before the term ‘cloud computing’ was coined). This book is derived out of thousands of support threads from customers, analysis of response times, efficacy of the model, and the pitfalls in putting your business on the cloud. No, the book is not about cloud bashing, but more about the reality of what customers faced—either in their ignorance, or due to lack of definitions and omissions.

With enough being said about why everyone (CEO and CFO included) should go cloud watching or about CIOs being beaten to death about adoption of cloud computing, the proponents of this disruptive technology are growing. This often leaves the CIO wondering about why he doesn’t get it and looks up for insight from Almighty—only to see some more clouds!

Recently, I met up with a cloud evangelist from the world’s largest cloud company. He was patiently explaining to the CIOs in a step-by-step way—on how to get started, where to get started from, and what to realistically expect. Now that made everyone sit up and listen with attention! Following the discourse getting into a debate with selected CIOs, the reality dawned on everyone that various XaaS models (where X = application, platform, and infrastructure, for now) do have limitations and challenges for any large enterprise to function in a hybrid model using cloud and internal capability.

Almost everyone who has adopted the cloud has used it for non-critical applications, test and development environments. In many cases, organizations use the cloud on fringes to connect road warriors or partners. Concerns remain around security, manageability, data retention, geographical statutes, service levels, and the evolving experience around how clouds behave. One point that had me jumping out of the chair after reading the above mentioned book’s synopsis was the gap between perception (and reality) around turnaround times for issues, patching and security management in an IaaS model. With 20+ hours to resolve issues and no patch management service, I would not even bet my test or development environments to the cloud.

Every industry evolution goes through the hype curve, and for now, cloud is still on the rising edge. With the number of companies announcing cloud based services (which do require large investments), I wonder if the future will see a cloud burst akin to the dotcom bubble burst that we experienced a decade ago.

I would stay cautiously optimistic until then, and learn to live in the rain !