Can the Cloud Clear the Mission-Critical Hurdle?

Grazed from ITBusinessEdge. Author: Arthur Cole.

The cloud wants enterprise data, and so far it has been fairly adept at gathering the low-hanging fruit: mostly bulk storage, archives, B&R, low-level database workloads and other non-critical stuff. But the real money is in the advanced applications – the kind of data that organizations will pay a premium to support because it brings the highest value to emerging business models…

This is a conundrum, however, because that high value also causes the enterprise to keep critical data close to the vest, which means cloud providers need to go the extra mile to win enterprise trust. And for the most part, that has not happened yet. This is a shame because in terms of both security and uptime, the cloud is at least on par with the typical enterprise and in certain key metrics is actually superior…

Cloud tracking site cloudharmony.com offers service status data for many of the top cloud providers going back at least a year, and its latest chart shows many services delivering four- or even five-nines availability. That puts outages at providers like Amazon EC2 and Google Cloud Service at mere minutes per year, while even three-nines performers confine their downtime to a few hours at most. A perfect record? Not by a longshot, but certainly no worse than the vast majority of enterprises out there…

Read more from the source @ http://www.itbusinessedge.com/blogs/infrastructure/can-the-cloud-clear-the-mission-critical-hurdle.html