Time to Make the Cloud Less Scary

Grazed from Channelnomics. Author: Chris Gonsalves.

If it’s Tuesday, it must be time for another cloud computing survey telling us how cloud adoption rates continue to skyrocket.

Yes, businesses of all sizes and types covet the cloud for its ability to slash IT costs, introduce speedy services and make systems scalable and flexible. If researchers thought to ask, there would likely be data showing that the cloud can reduce wrinkles, trim ugly fat and raise the IQ level of the average CIO.

How hard could this really be? Cloud computing practically sells itself, right? Turns out, it’s tougher than it looks. For a technology that’s been dubbed the most important and disruptive of its generation, the cloud comes with more disclaimers than a frequent flyer program, and more caveats than the Irish Sweepstakes. Even the most optimistic surveys end with a “but” or “however” that takes some of the starch out of the whole happy affair. If cloud computing were a car, it would be a Toyota Celica with a rocket engine, handlebars, bicycle brakes – but no seat belts. Sure, it’s fast, but … Yeah, it’s cheap, but … Try selling that to one of your loyal customers…

Solution providers in the business of selling cloud-based services to clients genuinely care about the crux of cloud computing is in those “buts” and “howevers.” Understanding what clients want is important when it comes to technology sales, but understanding what they fear is vital. Everybody has a message of cloud utility right now. Few have a pitch that stresses security and appeals to the most basic human instinct: the need to feel safe.

End users are continually trying to make that point. They’re interested but wary. Consider new research from IDG Enterprise and NTT Communications Corp. presented today at the CIO 100 Symposium & Awards Ceremony in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif. It contains all the requisite positivity about cloud adoption: 61 percent of global businesses surveyed are implementing or testing cloud. More than one-third (38 percent) have implemented cloud in one or more locations, and another 23 percent are pilot testing cloud projects.

No challenges there, right? Read a bit closer and you’ll find the “howevers.”

Enterprises remain skittish about cloud security. As a result, they’re becoming increasingly reluctant to trust third-party providers with anything more than smaller, less critical (read: low margin) pieces of their cloud strategy. Anyone hoping to entice customers to allow a service provider to provision cloud services for them has a steep hill to climb. Only 16 percent of those responding to the IDG survey say they’d even consider cloud services using third-party provisioned servers only. Nearly double that (31 percent) say they are using or evaluating cloud services with company-owned servers only. 58 percent of the in-house folks say security is the key driver for their decision.

That leaves 53 percent using some combination of in-house and third-party resources, but the balance of those assets is unlikely to favor service providers or develop the kinds of high-margin, value added services the channel so desperately wants from cloud sales.

The concerns match the findings of the recent Ponemon Institute and Thales eSecurity survey that showed 40 percent of organizations feel cloud adoption has decreased their company’s security posture. More than 60 percent say they have no idea what cloud providers are actually doing to protect their data.

Intel Corp. recently presented its own survey data showing businesses adopting public cloud services suffered more security breaches than they did with their traditional IT infrastructure. Some 28 percent of those Intel surveyed said they’d suffered at least one security breach in the cloud. 57 percent said security was keeping them out of the cloud all together.

Security and comfort with third-party providers isn’t the only obstacle the channel needs to cross. Enterprise users also worry about bandwidth and network capacity choking off their shiny new cloud services. About half say while they are satisfied with the cloud’s flexibility and scalability benefits, its impact on network management has been negative. In fact, nearly 75 percent of the respondents to the IDG survey said network performance issues such as capacity limitations and downtime when initiating or changing network configurations were their top concerns when it comes to the cloud.

The conversation around business use of the cloud is changing; morphing inexorably from noise and bluster to substance and seriousness. Solution providers serious about delivering cloud services nee to follow that thread. They need to sharpen their message and their offerings to address concerns about security, control and reliability.

From the network perspective, the fix is easier, and more technology based. Even as concerned as the majority of IDG respondents appeared over networking capacity and configuration issues, they solidly endorsed the idea of cloud services that come attached to virtualized network services. Forty percent said they were familiar with virtualized network services and 91 percent said they were interested learning about cloud services that include a virtualized network. Of those, more than half said they expected such a service would deliver better performance, reliability, cost efficiency, and flexibility.

Those results are a boon to third-party providers in a position to bundle cloud and virtual network services. The market has said they want to hear more. It’s up to the providers to rise to the challenge now.

The security issue is a bit thornier. In reality, the cloud has become safer for critical enterprise data, with continual improvements and hardening of the systems offered by IaaS providers. And even though they are rarely used, encryption technologies and key-management strategies exist that would make most cloud platforms as secure as the average in-house enterprise data center. That these messages haven’t fully reached potential buyers yet says more about the art than the science of marketing and selling cloud services. The Intel report provides some answers for the vendor community that are equally appropriate and adaptable to service providers:

• Provide the ability to create data boundaries that allows clients to control where certain workloads can be run .
• Help customers understand how the provider’s infrastructure is high integrity and free of malware.
• Give customers ways to compare security levels across a number of cloud providers.

Implementing associated virtualized networking services and strengthening the security message around cloud will be among the key differentiators that separate the successful cloud services providers from the back of the pack when the inevitable market shake-up and consolidation arrives. If your pitching cloud based on its known benefits today, you’re wasting your time. The entire customer base gets that already. Better bet: alleviate their fears and concerns. Appeal to their primitive need for safety and security. Entangle these early adopters now. Make your cloud offering impossible to resist and difficult to move away from. Any survey you look at will tell you that’s the way to go.