Cloud computing is awash in myths and assumptions.
The technology — which goes by the name “Software as a Service” or other names — is still poorly understood in many quarters.
However, it is slowly getting a better reception in executive offices.
The pendulum seems to have swung over the past five years, said Brian Wood, director of cloud marketing at Teradata Corp. in San Diego. Corporate attitudes have gone from “absolutely not” to “why not?”
One of the most recent cloud converts is the UC San Diego Health system. The organization announced on Aug. 7 that it was moving its electronic medical records to the cloud. It expects the transition to take three years.
Cloud computing is definitely on the rise. Early this year, IT analyst Gartner Inc. forecast that the worldwide market for public cloud services will grow from $209 billion in 2016 to $383 billion in 2020. One component of that, Software as a Service, is expected to almost double in that time, growing from $38.6 billion in 2016 to $75.7 billion in 2020.
In a nutshell, cloud computing takes computing assets out of an organization’s private data center, and houses them off-site in a vendor’s data center. The client company taps into its records via an internet connection to the vendor’s data center.
There are several misconceptions about that relationship, which brings us to our first myth.
Cloud Computing Is Not Secure
Wrong.
“Cloud security is better than what you can get on premises,” said Marc Clark, director of cloud strategy and deployment with Teradata (NYSE: TDC).
Think of the big data breaches that have made their way into the public consciousness, the ones involving Target Corp. (NYSE: TGT), Home Depot Inc. (NYSE: HD) and Anthem Inc. The common thread, Clark said, is these happened with on-premises data centers rather than in the cloud.
Still, Teradata found in a 2016 survey that 80 percent of people who didn’t want to move to the cloud cited security as the top reason.
Jerome Fodor, chief technology officer of University City-based AbacusNext, has watched the pendulum swing.
“Many of the most compliance- and security-driven organizations are big adopters of cloud computing, including those in government, financial and medical,” Fodor said. “The reality is that cloud computing can be as secure — if not more secure — than traditional IT, depending on how and where it’s implemented.”
AbacusNext offers cloud-based office solutions to the legal and accounting markets.
There has been a change of heart in the medical community.
“Our patient information is golden. … We’ve got the trust of our patients,” said Dr. Christopher Longhurst, chief information officer at UC San Diego Health.
Though the federal government has strong laws related to health information, and the health care vertical is probably more nervous than most about cloud computing, UC San Diego chose to move to the cloud, rather than invest more money in an existing data center.
University officials said they have confidence in moving patient records out of the system’s Kearny Mesa data center and into a data center halfway across the country.
Epic Systems Corp., the company that has provided the university’s health care record software for a decade, will put the data under its roof in Verona, outside Wisconsin’s capital city of Madison.
Cloud computing offers timely cybersecurity updates and patching as well as heightened security controls, the university said in a statement. Disaster recovery will also be easier, the university said, and hosting vendors will be able to provide security that is specific to the applications they are running.
“If you look at the tools that you have access to in those clouds …, it’s amazing,” Clark said. “Try to go get a budget for some of these software packages and some of these security packages that are offered on a per-hour basis — for pennies per hour — on these clouds.”
Teradata describes itself as a data and analytics company. It helps very large, Fortune 100 firms make sense of their data.
Ohio-based Teradata has a major center in Rancho Bernardo, which includes research and development. The business employs about 1,000 people in San Diego County.
On to the next myth …
Cloud Computing Saves Money
That assertion about saving money can be true in certain circumstances. “There are certain workloads that are good for the cloud and there are certain that aren’t,” said Ed White, vice president of product marketing with Teradata.
Consider a very big company using computers for production.
“If you have persistent, consistent workloads — so the cloud’s on most of the time, for months and months and months on end, which a lot of enterprise production applications need to be — the cloud’s not going to be cheaper for you,” Clark said.
Of course, if the cloud provider bills by the hour, the way to save money is to shut the system off when you are not using it. Not everyone does.
White recalled that he was part of a startup that moved everything to the cloud. After leaving the cluster on all night long, the company got hit with a big bill.
Clark described that as “leaving the faucet on.”
If anyone is uncertain about whether cloud or on-premises computing is best for them, Fodor of AbacusNext recommends a thorough look at the issue.
“Costs can vary from workload to workload, which makes doing an in-depth technical cost analysis up front all the more important,” he said. “Working with an experienced cloud adviser is a must for any business looking to make the move.”
The bottom line, Clark said, is that businesses should not go to the cloud to save money.
“Let agility and flexibility and self-service and efficiencies — let those be the reasons why you move to cloud,” he said. “And in some instances and in some use cases, you will save more money.”
Next myth …
Cloud Computing Is Easy
Some claim that cloud computing is the easy way to go. Clark disagrees. It is difficult, he said, to take production applications that keep a business running and put them in the cloud.
“You don’t just flip a switch and it all works. … The cloud doesn’t come with pixie dust,” he said. There is genuine work involved.
Clark pointed to the experience of Netflix Inc., the movie-streaming company which now uses the cloud for major portions of its business. Netflix (Nasdaq: NFLX) shuttered its data centers and went to cloud services provided by Amazon Web Services. The transition took the better part of a decade: Netflix executive Yury Izrailevsky said in a blog post that his company started its migration of customer and business data to AWS in 2008 and shut down its last company-owned data center in early 2016.
It should be noted that Netflix’s video streams come through a separate content-delivery network. Those servers are geographically dispersed in an attempt to make Netflix traffic as local as possible.
Netflix’s journey to the cloud took seven years, Clark said. “Does that sound easy to you?”
While the journey may have been arduous, Netflix has gotten benefits from cloud computing, including flexibility.
The business has been able to expand and contract depending on demand. “You don’t have to build the church for Easter Sunday,” Clark said. That is, an organization doesn’t have to build the infrastructure to accommodate a maximum crowd that is probably way above average. A cloud-based system can expand as needed, once a week, once a quarter or once a year.
Adam Gold, chief technology officer for UC San Diego Health and UC Irvine Health, said that scalability is one positive aspect about moving medical records to the cloud. “It’s a lot more agile,” Gold said.
There are other myths. Jim Matteo, CEO of Bird Rock Systems in Sorrento Mesa and Aliso Viejo, hears talk that all computing is going to move to the cloud one day. He doesn’t believe it.
Just as there are more myths, there are other arguments for computing in the cloud, including one that shows up in spreadsheets.
With computing resources in the cloud, businesses can emphasize operational expenditures rather than capital expenditures, Teradata’s Wood said.
“Many companies like [the cloud] for the accounting treatment,” he said.