Corporate cloud adoption still faces obstacles

Organisations adopting cloud computing – whether internal, external or hybrid – still face a number of problems, according to Herb VanHook, vice president of strategy at BMC.

"Not all cloud providers are created equal," he said, referring to fundamental differences in their offerings, such as the way Rackspace will supply a bare virtual machine but Amazon will not. Furthermore, providers have their own APIs, and BMC’s management software can only abstract them to the extent the services are similar. This makes workload portability challenging.

The location of data is another matter that needs to be addressed. Typically, processing needs to occur close to where the data is stored, but there are technical and compliance issues.

Various technologies are coming to address the former, but "it’s still a big issue," VanHook said.

On the governance and compliance side, a major issue is that it is not always possible to tell in advance where your data will be stored. Some customers – notably government users – will need to ensure that certain types of data are stored only within the local jurisdiction, and this could lead to "a massive Balkanisation of cloud computing at the country level."

Taken together, these factors mean "you will end up with a pretty complex service provider environment," making life difficult for organisations to use cloud computing.

There are also commercial issues. High on the list is the way some cloud providers – notably Amazon – work on a transactional model, whereas most organisations want a contractual model with service level agreements, penalties, and so on. That said, a few use cases such as load and stress testing are suited to transactional arrangements, and BMC itself uses cloud services in that way.

Organisations are increasingly looking for stronger SLAs and data privacy agreements, but providers cannot always offer what they are asking for, he said.

VanHook predicts that technology, skills, regulations and legal constructs will all improve over time. "The outlook [for cloud computing] is pretty rosy."