Cloud Computing: cutting through the hype

Last night I attended First Tuesday's networking seminar - 'The Future of Cloud Computing'. With an impressive line-up of speakers including Mat Clayton from Mixcloud, Stuart Hibbert from icomplete and Mike Wright from Striata, it provided a reality check to the current hype-cycle media clamour associated with all-things 'Cloud'.

Issues associated with the 'Cloud' were raised by most of the speakers, as well as the audience, time and time again. As Stuart succinctly put, these are: "Interoperability, security, reliability, performance, legal, portability, availability and management." And the costs associated with latency - by the micro-second - can be enormous: for example, a delay of half a second on search returns, Google loses 20% of potential advertising revenue.

A key point was also raised, that the 'Cloud' is certainly good for start-ups and projects due to its cost-saving benefits, however until standards such as the Cloud Manifesto (which looks at issues such as standards, security, evolution, access and discrimination, transparency, and interoperability) ensure that the sector matures, it is not a viable solution for larger global enterprises.

Striata's Mike Wright presented some fascinating case-studies that his company has worked on involving highly complex legal and technical issues associated with data transfers between the EU, America and China. He also highlighted the very real problems associated with the US Patriot Act. His obvious experience of having 'done it' was impressive.

And the closing words from Dell's Alastair Mcfadzean was that the cloud is an enabler. He said "Cloud is not about technology, it is about making IT efficient and more responsive to the business" - in other words, it is about businesses looking at their business models and adapting.

Ironically, one of the most well known Clouds that touches many of our lives - Googlemail - failed spectacularly, last night. There were thousands of tweets per minute of disgruntled, irate and upset users unable to access their Gmail accounts. This demonstrates how reliant we are on the 'Cloud' already - and even with a free-service there are massive expectations that it should be available and reliable.