Image courtesy Catherine Gater

So, according to business leaders, what is cloud computing?

‘A way of getting computer needs on demand — a bit like getting water piped to your home, but paying by the drink, not the bottleful’ was one summary. For Mike Hill, of IBM, it was more a question of ‘cloud economics,’ which have several key characteristics: pay-as-you-go consumption, lower costs through virtualization, customer self-service and automated service management software to reduce labor costs.

The panel also discussed some of the barriers to adoption. The general opinion was that psychology was at the root of reluctance to push data and processes out into the cloud. Customers want the new service to be more reliable and more secure than what they already have, probably an unreasonable expectation. Generally, the panel agreed that SMEs and consumers would be the ‘first to fall.’ After all, who doesn’t have a webmail account? Larger companies have more invested in their current infrastructures and may need more reassurance to make use of cloud resources for sensitive data. However, as Jay Chaudhry of Zscaler pointed out, there’s no need to ‘boil the ocean;’ even big companies can put a toe in the water with email or customer relations management tools, before casting a whole data center into the drink.

And is cloud computing the Holy Grail to solve the credit crunch? Figures for the potential size of the market varied — some said around 50 billion dollars, some up to 800 billion by 2013. A note of caution when bandying around these numbers: The full costs of your current solution shouldn’t be underestimated; don’t forget to include all the labor and training costs as well as the hardware bill you’re saving. However, with software development growing at only 3% per year, and cloud at 30%, there’s clearly something in it — as Duncan Stewart of Deloitte Canada put it: “At the moment, cloud computing is somewhere between ‘hype’ and ‘hyper.’ ”

—Catherine Gater, EGEE. A version of this story also appeared on GridTalk’s GridCast

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