As companies are about to start the year afresh with new hopes and targets for their cloud projects, Asia Cloud Forum asked the major cloud service providers and enablers about what they believed to be the biggest misconceptions about cloud computing in 2012.

The following highlights six of them, which concern misconceptions from conception, cost-benefit analysis, solutions design to application. With these we hope our readers will continue to reap real benefits from cloud adoption.

 

"I predicted that some of the laggards will likely seek ways to leverage cloud methodologies that improve IT efficiency. I also predicted some will fall prey to cloud washing by purchasing traditional IT infrastructure named 'cloud' in an attempt to satisfy their 'cloud-envy,'" said Nicos Vekiarides, CEO of TwinStrata. "Verdict? Watch for cloud poseurs abusing a new buzzword: 'software-defined,'" he predicted.

 

Cost, although a key benefit, is not the only benefit for cloud services. Cloud computing brings other important benefits including agility, scalability and fast provisioning. "The multiple benefits of cloud services help enterprises meet their objectives for mobility, cost effectiveness and business continuity. However, with enterprises viewing the lower TCO (total cost of ownership) as the ultimate benefit of cloud, they may not be able to reap the dividends of other benefits," said Taylor Man, executive vice president, New Business Division, NTT Com Asia.

 

"Probably the biggest mistake I think organizations can make with their adoption of cloud, is to apply changes from purely a technical standpoint, without also incorporating plans for business processes and people processes," said Mark Smith, managing director, SavvisAsia.

"The new economics and agility offered by cloud technologies is systematically changing the roles of the CIO and IT department. The aspiration is to have internal IT achieve far greater alignment to the business through an approach of outsourcing commoditized capabilities (such as managing infrastructure), and allow them to focus upon differentiated services."

 

According to Patterson the Equinix CTO, all cloud service providers at the moment, applications hosted in the cloud are not automatically distributed, and enterprises need to pick one location for its applications to live and prepare its own backup in case of failure.

"The proximity of the data center becomes very important to ensuring uninterrupted services. The data center needs to provide a flexible environment for cloud providers to host applications closer to customers in key markets -- enterprise or consumer -- with a wide choice in networks and managed service providers across its global footprint," he said.

 

The Equinix CTO Lane Patterson argues this is a common misconception. He said: "In fact, the cloud does not automatically backup nor provide a tool to automatically mirror the solution or application to another location. Hence, if there is a failure or fiber cut in/to the data center, the user will experience service outage."

Likewise, NTT Com Asia said it is wrong to view cloud solutions as being fault-tolerant or disaster-proof by default due to its redundancy nature. "Instead, enterprises should take disaster recovery into consideration when designing their cloud solutions. They should always consider the providers that can provide cloud solutions in multiple sites and/or multiple regions to further mitigate the risks of disasters," said NTT Com Asia's Man.

 

Sceptics fear that cloud solutions have proprietary encryption formats that can lock-in customers and make it difficult to migrate data in the future. This is a valid concern, but it is not specific, let alone concerns that are unique to cloud computing, according to F5 Networks.

"On-premise vendors also have proprietary formats, not to mention prohibitive migration costs and the need for specialized technical expertise, which can prevent organizations from moving to a different solution," said Linda Hui, managing director, Hong Kong and Taiwan, F5 Networks. "In fact, most quality cloud service vendors make it easy to not only access but export data as is. Companies that use cloud successfully address these concerns before choosing a vendor by doing thorough research into migration and support options.