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A major topic in any discussion of Enterprise Architecture these days is Cloud Computing – a central theme to Federal CIO Vivek Kundra’s direction regarding U.S. Government IT infrastructure. 

A commonly misunderstood (or poorly-understood) concept, most times that the term “Cloud Computing” is used, the term is generally referring to an organization using software or IT resources from the “cloud”, or the Internet at-large, as opposed to software or services hosted on physical hardware at their location.

As an oft-used example, office document-editing software can be purchased and installed on every desktop in a company, with documents stored on physical servers that are purchased, installed, powered, backed-up and maintained by that organization.   Or, a company can instead use resources from the “cloud”, having their organization instead use a solution like Google Docs or the forthcoming web-based Microsoft Office solution.  In such a case, physical servers are purchased, installed, maintained and backed-up by Microsoft or Google, and all the organization is then responsible for is paying for the service, and for their WAN bandwidth to reach that service.

Both Microsoft and Google, two of the biggest upcoming players in the Cloud Computing space, have recently put together new headquarters to deal with the massive Cloud Computing market that is the Federal Government.  [See pictures here of the Microsoft and Google DC HQ’s] And with good reason.  What will this Cloud Computing initiative mean to your organization’s enterprise architecture?  As a major player in the Federal Government IT space, we can definitely say:  potentially lots. 

Decisions you may have come to in the past regarding the most efficient way to deploy hardware, software and personnel may now be different, with increasing amounts of very usable and cost-effective IT services now being available in the Cloud. 

At first glance Cloud Services may be the holy grail you’ve been looking for to cut costs on IT deployment.  But there are a few things to consider:

• Hardware/Software Acquisition & Maintenance Costs:  The most obvious benefit to a Cloud Computing solution is to cut back on IT expenditures related to buying server iron, server software, client software and the systems-management headaches related to keeping it all up to date.   The cost of utilizing software from the cloud like Microsoft’s upcoming online office suite could slash such budgets to pieces.  But then there’s the additional infrastructure cost of your now-mission-critical WAN link out to all these cloud services.  How to weigh the differences?  We can help.
  
• Security: One of the biggest concerns with any cloud solution is security.  The moment you begin to allow your innermost corporate documents to be potentially searchable on Google Docs, visions of planetary security meltdowns like the movie “Eagle Eye” come to mind.  How will your software-as-a-service partners handle this?  How will you?  Ask us for advice.
  
• Integration:   A luxury of having all of your servers & software in-house is that there are no limits on the customization, workflow and data-flow changes you can make, especially with such intricate tools as Microsoft SharePoint.    But take a tempting prospect like outsourcing your SharePoint systems to the cloud.  Yes, you now won’t have to pay the tens of thousands of dollars for myriad servers to run it, and the IT guys to keep it from breaking – but how will you now integrate this with your backend data, or <gasp> even other cloud services like salesforce.com data, etc?  And how to keep this all secure?   Ask us for advice.
  
• Reliability:  There are a very different set of circumstances related to reliability that face one in the Cloud Computing sphere.  With internally-hosted applications, one has complete control over reliability.  Want more availability, buy more servers.  Too much downtime?  Fire your sysadmin.  It may be painful and expensive sometimes, but at least it’s entirely in your control.  With cloud services, it’s different.  The reliability of your WAN link now even more than ever becomes a business critical affair.  If you lose your WAN link to the Internet, you’ve now got everyone who uses Google Docs or any other hosted app totally out of work.  Additionally, and perhaps more pertinent, recent service outages by Google on their Gmail systems point to issues there as well.  If you’ve got your infrastructure designed around a new cloud service like Google Docs – if they’re experiencing downtime, there’s no sysadmin for you to yell at nor a hands-on solution you can do besides calling Eric Schmidt every name in the book.  So, how to construct the service-level agreements (SLA) for your cloud computing services?  What should you expect?  How can you be prepared?  Ask us.

Summary

All told, Cloud Computing is an inevitable force and direction of the industry, and like any tool, it has correct and incorrect applications.  It’s now up to every IT manager and developer to get themselves educated on what they can do to best take advantage of this trend.

But with the amount of pressure the Obama administration is under now to cut costs, and create a lean, mean, and efficient Federal Government, the time to consider your strategy on this is definitely now.

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