A dose of cloud reality
By Chee Sing Chan 20-Jan-2011
BT's Neil Sutton talked to Enterprise Innovation, sister publication of Asia Cloud Forum, late last year on the need for some hard truths on cloud computing as users lose patience in the endless stream of fuzzy promises.
Neil Sutton is vice president of global portfolio, BT Global Services. In this role, he is responsible for creating and managing the portfolio of products, services and propositions BT offers to its larger corporate and public-sector clients.
Enterprise Innovation: Cloud computing is being associated with everything under the sun today, is there a danger that people are getting clouded out with all this hype?
Neil Sutton: When I talk to customers I am very careful about the words I use because there are a number of our clients who are reacting in terms of reading the latest stories filled with promises about the future and it can count against us when trying to deliver results.
| "[I]f you have ever done the economics of it you would never want that same resource being operated on a continuous steady state basis." -- Neil Sutton, global portfolio VP, BT Global Services |
I think we're in hype fatigue and I think everybody agrees. A lot of business units have read about the idea and are thinking that they can go to an Amazon, or use Google, or buy this service from BT or whoever, and sometimes they use the phrase "cloud," and sometimes not. I think what is clear is that there are some very strong user stories for what people want to use cloud-type services for.
There is a dangerous promise emerging here, particularly with the business unit executives and maybe the CEO, where they see others ramping up capabilities by tapping into cloud services, and they are probably asking with some envy: "why can't my IT be like that?" How does the IT department deal with that expectation?
Sutton: Ramping up is definitely key here. You see retailers buying resources for the weekend because they are doing a 24-hour sale online. I think certainly one of the strong cases for cloud is when you do want to ramp it up quickly.
But if you have ever done the economics of it you would never want that same resource being operated on a continuous steady state basis. I think it would cost you more than you quite realize. And I notice quite a few customers saying we have to focus these things on where we value the flexibility and then we'll pay for it, and not confusing it with the steady state efficiency we need in some of the other operations.
I think the key in the future is how to drive the operational efficiency and how you manage that, otherwise you are in danger of having a whole bunch of things in a new environment and then a whole series of things in an old environment. And then you end up with an almost schizophrenic operation, and I think that there would be a danger of putting costs up, not taking it out.
So where will cloud services be best utilized?
Sutton: I think where people should use cloud infrastructure is in a turn-it-up, turn-it-down scenario. You need to focus on what these are, where you want to be highly flexible, like as I said, a 24-hour sale, the test and development environment for application tests, those sorts of things. Maybe a seasonal application, or a festival or something, or Christmas -- I think that is where people will value that degree of flexibility.
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