Bladewatch.com

NY Times

Clouds, clouds, clouds. Everyone talks about Google-style cloud computing — software as services off in the Internet “cloud” — as the future.

But while cloud computing is a marketing triumph, new research from McKinsey & Company asserts that trying to adopt the cloud model would be a money-losing mistake for most large corporations. The research is being presented at a symposium on Wednesday afternoon, sponsored by the Uptime Institute, a research and advisory organization that focuses on improving the efficiency of data centers.

The McKinsey study, “Clearing the Air on Cloud Computing,” concludes that outsourcing a typical corporate data center to a cloud service would more than double the cost. Its study uses Amazon.com’s Web service offering as the price of outsourced cloud computing, since its service is the best-known and it publishes its costs. On that basis, according to McKinsey, the total cost of the data center functions would be $366 a month per unit of computing output, compared with $150 a month for the conventional data center.

An interesting article, for the enterprise what we’ll find is that we outsource those activities or workloads that are not in themselves business critical. By that I mean, my raw data processing for my risk reports, or for other organizations it might include the email or file storing/backup processes.  We have to manage the need to be efficient in the way we provide service whilst managing corporate identity/security and stay in line with compliance and regulations. Related to this are the olden days (though possibly necessary) issues of data and security, if I rent 300 blades (in terms of cpu time) the static data generated at that point in time, is it deleted? Is it unique to me as a business customer? The application code is that securely erased, the existing issues with white labelling, providing the same service/application might occur in the cloud environment, though arguably if these issues do occur, it might be that you are not using cloud in the way that it was intended, that you’re trying to apply an application or service which is cloud compatible but not cloud suited.

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