Cloud or Garage?

So is it a cloud or is it a garage?

Could it be both?

The current trend in the IT industry is "The Cloud" or more specifically Cloud Computing. There are now a number of start-up companies plying the "Cloud" concept to sell to corporations and to SMEs. The point here is does "The Cloud" actually exist?

Okay so you choose Microsoft Azure or Amazon EC2 and you know that you're getting some top class infrastructure but at a pay per use cost. But many applications in businesses just won't go into the cloud as an ethereal application as they are typically idiosyncratic and just won't fit into the cloud based model. But there are people out there who want to sell you the buzz word "The Cloud".

So what are you going to get? Well you may not know and it may not be a cloud it may just be "The Garage" because they need to sell an ethereal solution that doesn't have any particular location or more correctly there are many locations then they aren't going to tell. So it could be in their garage or maybe in their bedroom!

When looking at the costs of moving to a cloud based infrastructure you may find that you are essentially renting rack space, connectivity and hardware just for your use and not really getting any benefits of Cloud computing. In fact you may as well just purchase/rent the facilities and the hardware required as after year 1 the costs are suddenly much lower.

In truth the real answer is go for a hybrid model and to make the choices on costs and attitude to risk. For many companies email and web based applications could easily move to the cloud but more specific applications may have to remain on premise.

Again the choice of provider of you "Cloud" needs to be investigated and you need to know exactly what they are offering cloud or otherwise you need to go and see, make sure they have something to show. Today it is relatively simple to purchase a domain name and purchase a website of the peg ready-made and a company suddenly looks pucker (just Google for template monster to see what I mean).

How many other customers have they got, where are their data centers, what category of data center are they using? Is it really a cloud based infrastructure or a dedicated service? Is it really a rental agreement which not only will work out more expensive but you are suddenly under someone's thrall.