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In this article, we hope to address that very issue. Moreover, we plan to be balanced and discuss both sides of the thing: why a business should considering moving its infrastructure into the cloud and why it might want to wait.

 

 

There is a growing paradigm shift. Cloud computing is software and computing infrastructure sold as a service – it’s the same model as a power company. You can pay a company for your computing needs, just like you can pay a company for electricity. Cloud companies can sell it to you cheaper than you can provide it yourself, for the same reason the power company can sell you power cheaper than it would cost you to generate it yourself – aggregation. The more people band together, the cheaper it gets.

 

The comparison doesn’t just end with aggregation – it continues into management. When the power goes out because a tree falls over the lines, do you go out to the telephone pole to repair it? No, you don’t, because that’s the power company’s job. That’s why you pay them, so you don’t have to keep an electrical engineer on staff for storms that knock out your power. So why not let the cloud computing company’s staff handle your computing management? It’s the same idea.

 

There are other advantages, too, of course – offsite disaster recovery, no upfront investments because billing is monthly, and longer workstation retention. But those things are just tertiary benefits of the biggest paradigm shift in computing since the move from the mainframe to the desktop computer – the really exciting thing about cloud computing is that the cloud is cheaper and easier than doing it yourself, and the more people that join, the cheaper it gets.

 

 

We’re being balanced here, so we have to talk about the downsides, too. There’s no need to play Pollyanna – there are some downsides to the cloud.

 

Migration from one company’s cloud to another company’s cloud could be a real hassle. Since your data is stored in their datacenter, if you have an issue with them and want to move on, you need their help to migrate. Since it’s likely that your servers will be stored as virtual machines, the actual migration will be surprisingly easy from a technical standpoint, but you are dependent on them from a customer service standpoint. So that’s a concern, but will become less of a concern as the platform matures and companies develop procedures for migrating to another cloud.

 

It’s possible there might be security concerns. There is no getting around the fact that some other company is holding your data when you use cloud computing. That’s scary. Of course, the company holding your data is also holding the data of a bunch of other companies. And some of those companies probably have data worth more than yours. But some of those companies are subject to complicated government compliance regulations, too. Of course, the upside is that the cloud computing company can’t afford mistakes with your data or anyone else’s, so they take proper precautions. They must comply with government regulations, since their clients must comply. In fact, they probably have tighter security than you would if you kept your data yourself – you’re getting the benefit of that aggregated compliance, even if you aren’t required to have it.  After all, the cloud computing business depends on being better than private management.

 

The last and final barrier to the move to cloud computing is intangibility. Before a move to the cloud, you could open up that coat closet (you know it as the server room, but the main climate control is the $29.99 oscillating fan from Wal-Mart, the fire control system is water-based sprinklers, and the door’s not even locked) and look at your old server. You could take out the hard drives, spill coffee on it, and even smell that scent of burning dust that means it’s never been cleaned.

 

You can’t do that with cloud computing. Sure, you can schedule a tour to the high-tech data center to see the physical servers that your virtual servers are running on, but that wouldn’t be the same. You used to be able to just open up the coat closet and see where your data came from – it’s in that that old server, sitting right there. On the cloud your data is stored somewhere else. It’s intangible. Of course, you try not to think about where that burger you’re eating comes from, either, and you seem to be okay with that. The real fact is, data is virtual anyway. It’s already intangible – it’s just the hardware that makes it seem as though it’s not. And the cloud has better hardware with the right people to manage it.

 

 

So that’s why people are talking about cloud computing and scared of it: it represents the biggest paradigm shift in computing since the desktop computer, and it will remain the biggest shift until mobile computing becomes the de facto standard. Of course, mobile computing will owe it’s acceptance to the cloud, so those are linked together, too.