Five serious lessons of early adopters appearing in cloud computing

While some large enterprises have shifted their information technology infrastructure to Third-party-managed services to save costs, small businesses, especially start-ups, are also relying on cloud computing services to cut initial costs and help them focus on core services and products. Oliver Friedrichs, chief executive of Immunet, the anti-virus software company that launched its first product last August, said large companies typically use infrastructure, such as Amazon's EC2 (Flexible Computing cloud), to provide resource flexibility to their research and development teams. For start-ups, the cancellation of a large number of data center investments at the start will allow many start-ups to reduce seed money and keep a low rate of burning money. Small Business using cloud computing services is a big win because you're really saving a lot of money and avoiding a lot of upfront investment. Five years ago, we should have built a large data center, but this cost makes it difficult for us to start our business.

Instead of having its own data center, Immunet uses Amazon's EC2 service to analyze the characteristics of malware code to help its products immunet protect identify viruses and trojans. The company also uses cloud computing services to provide antivirus services to its 125,000 users and adds new virtual servers as users grow.

The cost-savings and scalability of infrastructure, a service product, are well known advantages. However, there are other advantages. In the interview, three small companies using cloud computing services and a small company that did not use cloud computing introduced lessons learned as they grew up with the cloud computing infrastructure.

1. From IT management to software development

Abandoning the data center immediately saves small and medium-sized enterprises significant costs: Server Administrators and Data center administrators. As a result, many companies are not reducing the total number of employees, but are investing the savings in budget to software developers who have experience with cloud computing.

' In traditional data centers, we need an IT staff to configure systems to racks, maintain servers, and have this hardware, ' says Friedrichs of Immunet Corp. And we don't need to hire any of those people right now, we have software developers who can write code on a very flexible platform that Amazon maintains.

For sales forecasting and analysis company RIGHT90, the cost savings of transferring its infrastructure to cloud computing are also an important advantage. Right90 did not start its own business with a third-party infrastructure. But the cost-saving and flexibility of cloud computing services is attractive. Last year, the company moved out of its data centers in Calgary, Ontario, and San Francisco, Calif., using Amazon's EC2 services and backing up servers in the company's offices. RIGHT90 chief executive Arthur Wong says there are no servers to manage to liberate the Right90 it team.

He says it operators are still doing more strategic things with the company than managing data centers and servers.

2. Reduce the shutdown time

One concern about migrating to cloud computing is that cloud services providers such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Rackspac will be targeted for attack, leading to a lot of shutdown time, Friedrichs said. So far, however, Immunet has not encountered any problems with Amazon's services. ' It's fair to say that our shutdown time has been zero since we started the company, ' he said.

Moreover, Friedrichs contends that the ability to use a new server within seconds provides customers with the redundancy they cannot provide when they manage their data centers.

He said that in a physical data center, your server is secure, but you do not have the same level of server clustering and fault tolerance as cloud computing services provide. You must plan ahead and purchase and configure redundant servers.

3. Security is still your problem.

Many companies believe that using a Third-party data center to host your server means that security is also managed by a third party. Not so, Friedrichs said. Protecting your server security in Amazon's cloud computing services is no different from securing your own data center server. Businesses not only worry about the security of their own virtual systems in cloud computing, but in many cases they have to prove what they are doing. File transfer Services YouSendIt decided to create and manage their own data centers in 2004 before cloud computing services became popular. But the company's founder and chief technology officer, Ranjith Kumaran, said that even with the current 12 million users, the company did not migrate its infrastructure to third party cloud computing services because security and compliance remained a prominent issue.

For example, he says, data security regulations are not working well at the moment. Our European clients require that their data be stored in Europe. Can Amazon guarantee that? The question has never been answered.

4. You based on the user's ability to use cloud computing

The question of where the data is stored emphasizes that the decision to migrate to cloud computing is not made by the enterprise, but by the users and customers of the enterprise. Compliance is a big problem for many businesses. But other security concerns are often useful. So far, cloud computing services have not fully met their requirements, says Kumaran of YouSendIt.

He said we actually say we like your stuff, but we're going to run it behind our own firewall.

For these users, YouSendIt creates a solution that leverages their local storage. In addition, if a customer asks to visit the data center, YouSendIt can show the customer their facilities in London without having to calculate which part of a virtual datacenter will meet the customer's needs.

5. Cost advantage lasted only so long

Sharethis, chief technology officer Nanda Kishore, said that while dealing with security and compliance issues, the cost savings of using cloud computing like utility services are huge, something that emerging companies will not give up in the short term. Sharethis allows people to share links to this site.

Since its inception in 2005, Sharethis has grown into a company that serves 150,000 websites, processing 1TB of data daily. Last year, the company has 30 to 50 virtual instances to provide links and information, the current number has increased nearly five times times. The flexibility of cloud computing makes it grow rapidly without the cost of capital.

Dynamic configuration is an important advantage of cloud computing, Kishore said. It's like a utility service that you configure when you need it to get back to the status quo after you finish your work. This is a huge cost advantage. But, YouSendIt Company's Kumaran said, as the enterprise grows, the cost advantage drops. Eventually you'll reach these economies of scale, and you'll shift your bandwidth-intensive work to your infrastructure. We've done this calculation: the best thing is if we move to Amazon, it's acceptable. The worst case scenario is that we're 2.5 times times more expensive to run in the cloud.

Sharethis also encountered this problem. Handling bandwidth costs becomes an important challenge. What is the company's solution? Use Akamai's services to move this part of the service to a marginal location.

' Because bandwidth is what you pay for by consumption, it's an important part of our cost, ' says Kishore of Sharethis. So we solved the problem by moving our data to cheaper places.

Kishore expects Sharethis to save 30% of its bandwidth costs compared with Amazon's services.

As a result, Right90 Wong says the growing problem is a problem most start-ups have to address. For most small businesses that provide online services, the advantages of cloud computing outweigh its disadvantages. He said I didn't know there was a server for Silicon Valley start-ups. I know 10 CEOs of emerging companies in Silicon Valley. None of them have servers, and perhaps up to one mail server.

(Responsible editor: The good of the Legacy)