Paranoia Will Destroy Ya

There’s an amusingly pugnacious post over at ZDNet by Ken Hess that asks why so many people seem to be paranoid about cloud computing.

Hess, with tongue in cheek (I think), conjures images of survivalist loonies in describing the mistrust that some of his readers apparently exhibit towards cloud. That seem like a bit much, but what with all the vendor hype surrounding cloud, I wouldn’t blame buyers for being skeptical.

I don’t know about paranoid, but I do know that the people we talk to about cloud infrastructure-as-a-service are very careful about adopting cloud. They already know what Hess mentions, that “cloud is computers, and computers are fallible.” What our customers want to talk about is how much of that fallibility has nScaled anticipated and engineered out (eg: our hybrid architecture for redundancy and latency), what SLAs we offer, and what the nScaled enterprise services agreement (all 35 pages of it) says the remedies are if we don’t meet the SLAs.

In other words, IT buyers want to have the same assurances from a cloud vendor that they ask from their hardware and software vendors: convince me that it works, and tell me what you’ll to make it right if (or when) it fails. This should all be a non-issue, except several of the highest profile IaaS providers, like Amazon, don’t have good answers for the corporate IT customers, and they’ve had failures, and some customers have been vocal in saying that they were left holding the bag. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Careful is good. Paranoid is unnecessary.