Business owners are waking up to cloud computing.
“Cloud is to a point now that it can really have a major effect on every industry,” said Christopher Furey, founder and CEO of Virtual Density in Danbury. His business offers multi-vendor cloud computing aggregation, storage and service. He said cloud computing is closing in on the idea of IT support as a utility.
“I realized four years ago that managing a big complicated data center wasn”™t cloud computing,” said Furey, who at the time co-owned Another 9 in Tarrytown, N.Y., which had rolling cycles of highs and lows between expanding space and the heating and cooling costs of managing a data center. In that model the servers he was hosting on racks had clients with internal IT support. He said the next step was pure cloud computing and virtualization.
“Cloud computing means a lot of different things to a lot of different people, depending on what industry you”™re in and what rhetoric you”™re familiar with,” said Ami Soifer, CEO of the TNS Group in Stamford, an IT consulting company that provides cloud-service management.
“To a degree there”™s validity to a large range of the cloud claims. Cloud comes from the idea that it”™s not local to the business or end client, which is why there”™s a huge gray area.”
Soifer said cloud computing, as it is being spoken about today, is the web-based outsourcing of the housing, storage and maintenance of software and server functions. Technically the first publicly successful clouds were web domain-based email service providers. Those clouds operated on an early level through software clusters, or multilocation services. Off-premises storage options were greatly increased after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, with businesses wanting their information secure and protected, Soifer said.
“Many businesses are very eager to use the cloud nomenclature,” Soifer said.
Virtualization has taken the cloud concept to the next stage by making the servers themselves, and therefore their maintenance and location, domain-based.
Westport-based technology research company Gartner estimates that by 2013, 60 percent of server workloads will be virtualized.
Also driving the cloud environment has been the increased speeds and capacity of connections. Technologies such as the dual-core ARM processors, which power some of today”™s mobile computing devices, have allowed for those devices to sustain cloud structures.
Furey said the cloud model is gradually making the traditional IT staff model obsolete, and many data storage centers are emptying their server racks in favor of virtualization.
“It changes the whole IT industry model,” Furey said. “We”™re not trying to remove job opportunities; but through this, and for the IT pros, you are going to see a skill-shift. The work is not going away, but where we do it and how is changing. While it is a life-changing model for our side of the business, the most important thing is what virtualization can do for other companies.”
Soifer said pushing the cloud market is cost, risk mitigation and agility. A recent survey of 500 IT decision-makers by Sand Hill, a software research group in San Francisco, found that 50 percent of respondents cited “business agility” as their primary reason for adopting cloud applications.
“The term cloud has really come on strong for the public this past year,” Soifer said. He said clouds allow businesses to be agile because they can switch to a more suitable technology without the trouble of having to revamp an entire network.
Furey said that computing standards come into play for all companies, but it is often at the start and end of a company”™s life where the true impact is realized.
“For a business looking to sell themselves off, if you haven”™t handled the information resources with care you”™re going to get scratched, nicked and dented when you do decide to sell,” Furey said.
According to a recent IBM study, 40 percent of companies backup their data and only 20 percent of that 40 percent test their systems to make sure the data is recoverable.
Furey said though not many company leaders think about their exit strategy when talking IT, it is the companies looking to become more efficient and the early stage companies that are really taking advantage of cloud computing.
“Cloud makes sense for people who are really IT dependent and need dependable IT,” Furey said. “That”™s an increasing portion of the population. With cloud you don”™t really have disaster recovery, you have inconvenience recovery, and usually that”™s when the service provider goes down; but you”™re data is always safe.”
Furey said early stage companies are excellent prospects for cloud computing, in Fairfield and Westchester especially, because they have low capital, high risk and are familiar with an enterprise level of back-end support.
“With cloud you have all of that covered,” Furey said. “People don”™t want to worry about how the lights or water are staying on; they just want to know they will be on.”
Soifer said the barriers to entry of cloud computing are often related to the ambiguity and confusion associated with the cloud concept.
“In any cloud computing service it”™s important for the business owner to understand what you are getting and to do homework,” Soifer said. “There are a lot of benefits to cloud computing, but because there is so much ambiguity, it”™s important for a client to really know what they are getting into before they sign on with a ”˜cloud provider”™”
Furey said though the ability to manage a business”™ IT through the cloud has been around for years now, the majority of businesses have yet to take part out of trepidation.
“Anyone who has built a business that has some real equity for itself, has something to lose,” said Furey. “With cloud there”™s a lot to learn about and a lot of alphabet soup.”
Furey said almost all business owners have been using clouds for years on the consumer level but fail to realize the correlation with the cloud until recently.
“Companies are at a point where they can be secure in these technologies and have a fulltime equivalent without the price of payroll,” Furey said. “They need storage, mail, record retention and archives, all which can be on the cloud today with little risk.”
