Of Cloud Capacity and Up times

With crazy economic times comes many innovations and new ideas to help save businesses and in this case the world from the dreaded monster it can’t seem to shake credit crunch. First all sorts of business, banks, insurance firms, went down in the great U.S. of A due to a number of young bright financial analysts and charming sales men (zero down), in conjunction with mortgage holders not telling their banks the truth of their incomes. Then the banks had a bright light bulb moments from our young financial analysts to export credit into Europe, where banks then start going down due to bad credit, Governments come in to save the day with all sort of loans and stock option buying, and true to the chain now all sorts of European Governments are going down in budget deficits and bad book balancing.

One such idea that has come up out of this economic crisis is the bundling of all resources to make computing more efficient and to reduce waste, as with the  credit crunch came reduced spending power, reduced huge IT budgets and the need for more and greater efficiencies. Hence the Advent of cloud computing in all sort of shapes and sizes first was SAAS( software as a service), second was PAAS (platform as a service) and now IAAS ( Infrastructure as a service) the chain is growing with large ICT organizations and vendors quickly aligning behind and in front of the cloud. It was bound to happen in an industry that changes as rapidly as the information technology and churns out ideas on daily basis, making even the hard nosed consultants and advisers dizzy trying to catch up.

With rapidly growing ideas, first moving developers, charming sales men and bottom line business strategist the advent of the cloud has moved from a toddler overnight to a full grown teenager with no parents to govern it or decide how to operate and give standards. Well I’m not one to stifle progress, and talk like the an auditors or security analyst on slowing down, but a good idea started by some who have though out capacity for a number of years of experience Salesforces, Amazon and Google can quickly turn into a nightmare. If all sorts of large organizations start rushing into it with no sort of standards and governance apart from the push of making a quick buck and reeling in the race leaders and getting a piece of the action (credit crunch scenario) will all be in a crunch.

Well this week I’ve seen a couple of comments on the internet and experienced some, twitter whale occasioned by some upgrade and user capacity handling, this can be irritating for any user, the infamous white screen of death by word press and now this morning Linked in upgrade screen, and finally Facebook security and information leaks. All this kind of left me thinking who is out their looking out for our needs, yes they are public sites, but somebody needs to put in standards and governance in place (consumer rights). Most of this sites started as small ideas, but the reach of the internet is not a simple thing to scale up on and plan for. Now for Corporates and Enterprises who drive business on proper capacity planning, up times and disaster recovery plans, the cloud can be savior and a killer at the same time, they should think twice and carry out serious evaluations before going into new cloud offerings not yet tested by time and experience, lest we all be left looking for help out of a spiraling chain.