How Close is the Cloud?

You can hardly escape the cloud these days. From Microsoft's catchy but often unclear mainstream advertisements (to the cloud!), to session after session focused on cloud computing. Everyone wants to sell us the cloud. Everyone wants to be a part of it. Software vendors small and large alike are extolling the cloud readiness of their products. Google is even building an operating system just for the Cloud. We are constantly being exposed to the modern day Paul Revere galloping through the night - The Cloud is Coming, the Cloud is Coming!

Ok, great. Sounds good. Cloud computing will revolutionize both the IT industry and the commercial technology industry. it will add features and lower costs. It will provide storage that will be as (if not more) secure than my hard drive. I can get rid of the rooms full of servers, and not have to worry about patching them or even replacing them on a regular basis.
Sold. I am ready. Where do I sign up?

There are some very nice options out there that you can take advantage of right away.

And there are a lot of technologies that have recently hit the market or are just about the launch. Microsfts Office 365 is being positioned to compete with one of the innovators in the Cloud, Google Docs, and will likely have a very fast adoption rate amongst the SMB set. It offers top tier features that most smaller firms can't afford, and no full time IT staff will be required to manage it all. Sure, it won't be as full featured as Office 2010 or a full blown Exchange server, but most folks only use 10% of the features available to them now. And some of the coolest new Office 2010 features will be in Office 365 right out of the box. Power Pivot is going to amaze data junkies! Integration with Lync will bring new connectivity options to people, and having everything stored centrally in the cloud will simplify remote access and file management across the company.

Again, this cloud stuff sounds great!

We may be ready for the cloud, but is it ready for us? Well, it isn't quite that easy just yet.

Here is an experiment for you to test your readiness to move your company to the cloud. Take all of the files you have stored on your hard drive, and move them to one of the cloud services. Then remove all of those files and don't store anything at all on your hard drive for two weeks. If you can't manage to get yourself entirely into the cloud, how do you expect to get your business there?

And what about the times when you don't have access to the Internet? Verizons highly touted, and very speedy, LTE network recently suffered two days of outages. No email, no Internet. Not good. Now add no access to your files, and no way to work offline. If your company was entirely cloud based and reliant on the Verizon network, you would be faced with potentially disastrous outages and loss of valuable employee time.

And it isn't just Verizon who has had made the wrong kind of news about the cloud lately. Amazon recently had several days where the cloud services that were hosted with them were inaccessible. If your company was highly leveraged to use their services and they were out of commission for several days, what would the impact be? Are all of the "savings" worth it if your employees can't work or your company goes dark for a few days?

These may be some extreme scenarios that are hopefully less and less likely to happen as the cloud service providers and the infrastructure they rely on continue to mature. But they did happen, and the risks associated with cloud computing as it is now simply can't be ignored.

Cloud computing holds enormous promise for the future. But it isn't something that can be leapt into today. It's not about jumping forward, it is about taking key steps. So what steps can we take NOW to get us more ready for the cloud?

We may be ready for the cloud, but is it ready for us?

In part 2 we'll look at a few ways that we can safely leverage some of the cloud services that are currently available.