Cloudy with a chance of outsourcing?

If you are not yet familiar with cloud computing, the basic idea is that instead of buying your own servers and creating your own infrastructure to manage and deliver your data and services, you can hire a third party to do it for you. The provider can then add processing power and storage capacity as your needs change, theoretically reducing the headache of scaling it yourself.

Amazon was an early arrival on the cloud computing scene with the Elastic Compute Cloud service. Google Apps was launched by Google as a way to develop software online and run the apps on the monster hardware at Google.

The idea of not owning and managing IT infrastructure can be very appealing to small and medium sized businesses and can be a great solution in some cases. The main benefit is if the cost of running your business from the cloud is less expensive than doing it yourself. It usually is.

But there are many concerns about security and justifiably so. What business wants to have sensitive data out of their direct control? Which businesses can legally put that sensitive data (like maybe your patient records) out on a cloud service? Many vendors are working on ways to make the customer data more secure in the cloud, but most experts agree that it is best to keep the important data close to home inside a private IT infrastructure and only send the less sensitive data, stuff that is probably already out on a web facing server, to a cloud solution provider.

Even Microsoft has been experiencing some pushback from experts who are not employed by the software giant, as I witnessed recently at the TechEd conference in New Orleans, a venue used by Microsoft to train and promote their products. Many of the speakers at the conference spoke at great lengths about the dangers of cloud computing, security being the first concern and availability being the second. What if the cloud provider needs to bring down the network, reboot a server, change a public IP address, any of which might interrupt your service? Can your business afford to lose internet presence and for how long? How long can your business function without an application or some data? These are some of the concerns expressed by the "non-koolaid drinkers", as one speaker put it.

Personally, I think it is a great idea. Much of our data is not too sensitive to be out there and there are ways to secure data out in the public domain. Which companies truly have data that is too sensitive to allow capture by random internet hackers? Of course some companies have true, legitimate security concerns but I think most have little to fear. And as far as availability, there are many ways to have multiple copies of your data and applications available to avoid being placed at the mercy of one cloud provider by using more than one provider and I expect we will see many solutions proposed and implemented in the coming year.

I do know that Microsoft's SQL Azure, a cloud solution for databases, is very easy to set up and connect to (for a pretty reasonable fee) and that many small companies will jump at the opportunity to have a serious, professional and scalable database solution for a fraction of the cost to do it yourself. The process to set it up was described to me by one Microsoft employee:

"First you export your data to a text file or something like that, send it to us, pay the fee and we send you the connection information." When I asked him to elaborate he said "That's all there is to say..."

It just doesn't get any simpler.

Since the vast majority of businesses are small businesses, I fully expect Microsoft Azure (web services) and SQL Azure (database services) to do a fair bit of business in the next business cycle, and many will choose to cloud compute.

- Peter Trast, SQL Expert; MCITP DBA, MCITP EA, MCT LinkIn with Peter