Cloud Computing: Getting Past the Hype

There was a nice post by Justin Pirie on the Cloud Computing Journal today, helping to demystify cloud computing and all the hype around it, both negative and positive.

His advice can be summed up as follows:
 

• When selecting a cloud provider, look for multi-tenancy and horizontal scalability
• Cloud providers are not, as a group, not secured and risky, and there are plenty of secure cloud vendors out there 
• Your data is not any more trapped with a vendor than it typically is within your own IT department, there are ways of migrating it, and typically — especially if you have a good provider — they’re easier than getting data out of your own proprietary legacy infrastructure
• Good cloud providers with strong SLAs are no less reliable than your IT departments
• Cloud adoption is not an “all-or-nothing” decision. It’s about having a strategy that dictates what makes sense to go in the cloud and what should stay put. 

This advice is in response to cloud “myths” that have been indicated in many surveys of IT departments. And so the myths and the advice around them is highly relevant to lots of people and management teams, including:

• Expansion stage software companies selling cloud computing services and solutions, looking for pain points to target with products and messaging
• Expansion stage software companies looking to host their solutions in someone else’s cloud
• IT departments looking at cloud solutions
• Venture capital investors looking for investment in the cloud computing space