The Rein before the Cloud

Getting CIOs to love cloud computing takes a lot of logic and a little bit of TLC.

By Siki Giunta, president and CEO, Fortisphere

Giunta says tech staffs still need to be wooed to the cloud. Photo: Jesse Justice

Cloud computing is inevitable. In fact, it's already thriving. Salesforce.com is in the cloud. Amazon.com is selling the cloud. Without the cloud, there would be no Twitter. And without Twitter, there would be no international uproar over riots in Iran, or millions donated to help Haiti.

The cloud, while typically transparent, is already ubiquitous.  Like any successful infrastructure technology, the more it pervades, the less it is explicitly felt.

This all said, the cloud has remained, to date, primarily an infrastructure resource of the small company, the young company, and the Internet company. Running your computing outside your four walls presents a much lower risk if you have no alternative – and most small firms haven't got a datacenter. And most new startups haven't got a lot to lose if something goes wrong in the ether.

So, what could go wrong? Most cloud vendors will tell you how rock solid their infrastructure, platforms, and networks are. But, we have all experienced Facebook outages and Gmail issues often enough to understand that the best of systems have hiccups. Certainly a company with its own datacenter is more than aware of that fact. More

Posted in: cloud computing, virtualization

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