The question: Whether to deploy certain important services outside the data center or in the "cloud." Historically the IT department has generally been unwilling to do this because, after all, when it comes to third parties, whom can you trust? Maybe the guy across the street who was a friend of your brother-in-law's cousin’s wife. But trust some virtualized entity on the other side of the cloud with your data? Until recently, that's been pretty much of a stretch.
Now, however, the game is changing.
There are some services that corporate IT centers do well, and others not so much. How well these things are done (irrespective of what these services happened to be) can be defined by answering two simple questions. The first question is: Does the IT team meet the objectives spelled out in the service level agreements (SLAs) they cut with their stakeholders? And the second: Do they do this with enough efficiency to keep the company competitive in the marketplace?
It makes sense to look to the cloud for things that data centers don’t do well, or that they don't do with much efficiency. Some services stand out as likely candidates for cloud computing and have two things in common. First, they are all likely to be responses to some relatively new requirements on IT (new within the last five years or so); second, each will require a different sort of control over corporate data than was previously necessary.
Consider the fundamental issue of e-discovery, a term that refers to the ability to search all kinds of digital data -- graphics, emails, photos, spreadsheets, whatever. Today, all businesses in the U.S., and probably most businesses outside the U.S. that work with U.S. businesses, are required to produce such data on demand in case of any civil litigation. (Note that I didn't say "every large business with a huge legal staff"; this applies to just about all businesses, whatever the size.)
Prior to December 2006, e-discovery was a non-issue, so most companies had no e-discovery capability at all. Now however e-discovery is the top litigation-related burden for general counsel at firms with annual revenue of more than $100 million. Failure to provide such documents within the required time period can result in substantial fines and put a company at a disadvantage in court proceedings.
Doing e-discovery is expensive, but the cost of not doing it properly can be catastrophic. Some observers suggest a single e-discovery process using manual or only semi-automated methods could cost a 1,000-employee company $50,000 to $70,000, and that a case costing $100,000 in legal fees could balloon to more than $5 billion if a confused document search returns more than 1 Tbyte of data for review.
Given that 90 percent of all U.S. companies are engaged in some form of litigation, what's a company to do if it lacks e-discovery capability?
Doing e-discovery in-house requires IT-ers to do a number of things they have never been trained to do. And, while they may be able to learn the required technology, what about the new requirement for IT management to move outside their own bailiwick and engage with other key stakeholders in the e-discovery process? How long will it take to put new processes and best practices in place? When, for example, was the last time an IT manager at your firm sat down and had a long discussion about corporate strategy with the company's legal department?
Yeah, right.
Most companies can't do this stuff well. Very few have the social structure to support the cross-departmental interactions that would be required for the e-discovery example. They should look to the clouds for the sort of thing. After all, it makes less sense to worry about where service is being provided from, and more sense to pay attention to the quality of the service being offered. If the service is up to snuff, what difference does it make where it comes from?
— Mike Karp, Senior Analyst at Enterprise Management Associates
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Thanks for pointing this out. The article is interesting, but IMNPHO (NP = "not particularly") is waaaaaay off the mark. This is because of one key issue: almost every point it makes in order to debunk the cloud is true... but it is true irrespective of whether the service in question comes from the cloud or the computer room next door.
You want a show-stopper for cloud computing? I'll give you one in my next blog.
I find the article quite interesting since it seems to negate all the positives of cloud computing thus making it in effect a 'redundant' process for any enterprise!
ah! Well, the idea that software people are more ameable to change than hardware folk certainly makes sense, and is sure suported by my own experiences (says the software guy). Of course, changing software is in most cases a lot easier to do than changing software.
You might want to consider however, that decisions such as these are rarely if ever made at a technical level. They are business decisions, and hopefully are based on sound analysis regarding return on investment/assets. So actually the issue becomes not one of changing hardware or software, but of changing the way a business process (or an IT process) is implemented. I think the real issue here may likely have a lot to do with overcoming the "investment" IT managers have in doing things they way they are used to doing things.
SOA/SaaS (software as a
service)/utility/on-demand and even "thin provisioning" are all
different facets of the same many-sided coin, but although all have approximately the same intent -- pay as you go, and only allocate what you need -- none of these terms (with the possible exception of "utility" and "on-demand") means precisely the same thing.
SOA, for example, can be (and historically has been) done in house, and makes no use of the virtualized pool of services that the cloud represents. SOA has some overlap with the concept of "cloud", but is not at all the same thing.
Probably SaaS, applications and services offered by a remote service provider, is the closest to the still-coalescing "cloud computing" model.
I'm not quite sure I understand your reference to "device heads" -- can you please explain?
Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is the approach we are talking about here. Adding services like clustering or encryption or security should be easy with an SOA architecture. Not only can this enable easy expansion of functionality but it can be done at low cost and with high assurance of successful integration. Companies can use this service model to add enhanced or new services without having to disclose to the world their precious IP.
The model works but device heads may be very slow to adopt this.
Wow! And I thought my viewpoint on this was a bit jaundiced.
I think that e-discovery will make things better for most of us, particularly when it comes to protecting intellectual property (the other IP) and saving money when the legal suits -- read that both ways -- arrive on your doorstep. The good news is that it doesn't require a lawyer to do e-discovery, altho one certainly should be there when setting up the policies that dictate how the search engine is going to work. E-discovery software can be run by anyone authorized to use the software, whether the discovery takes place in your corporate IT center or somewhere out beyond the clouds.
Thanks for your interesting comment.
P.S. Thanks also for the Mark Twain reference. He is an infinitely deep well of intelligence for all of us.
P.P.S. The Shakespeare quote about lawyers is from Henry VI. It isn't subtle, but it sure is succinct.
Actually, Mike, I think we'll see double billing from the lawyers, with the discovery time for the machine being billed as "research costs". After all, they will have for pay for this service, just as they would have to pay for expert witnesses.
And I'm not sure what Henry VI's advice was about lawyers, but I would refer you to Mark Twain: "If all of the lawyers were sunk into the ocean, the US would be the better for it, and the fish the worse."
THis is purely opinion, but when law enters the technical field, it only seems to make things more difficult - patents clog innovation, legal requirements for documentation clot up our archiving systems, and the extreme fear of being consider legally culpable leads to a lack of communication.
It's not easy for a technician to tiptoe around the law.
Murugan:
There absolutely are service providers offerong e-discovery services, just as there are many software firms that can put e-discovery capability in the hands of your own in-house IT staff.
This is a sort of search engine, but the real issue here is not just knowing where the info is located (unfortunately, in many cases it's located everywhere, on servers and desktops all across the company). It is just as important for the discovery capability to be aware of what the content actually means. Some of the more sophisticated implications can understand both explicit (e.g., a search on a particular word) and implicit meanings (an understanding of context).
And in just about all cases, it is crucialthat the search tool be kept out of the hands of all buth those who are authorized to use it.
Nah, what destroyed the Roman Empire was a mixture of imperial mismanagement, outsourcing of key responsibilities facilitated by constant redefinition of the term "Roman citizen", and an unhealthy series of visits by fun-loving bands of Ostregoths, Visigoths and the like.
But to your real point - It's not really clear that technology necessarily creates more documents (although I think you are right about this), but it certainly makes what documents do exist a geat deal more visible. Whether or not they are "intelligently visible" is of course a whole other issue, one that has less to do with the amout of data than it does with the quality of the metadata tags associated with the data. It's actually easier to search millions of digital files that are intelligently searchable than it is to look at 100 files, digital or analog, that are not.
One likely result if this is that lawyers will hate this new technology, which will severely reduce the number of billable hours with which they can sock their clients.
Perhaps the best bet is to follow Henry VI's advice.
(One IE bonus point, redemable for 10 Mb of extra bandwidth, to the first 10 people who can identify what this was ...)
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