IT services are increasingly being accessed via a type of tap that we merely turn on or off. No need to worry about the plumbing, writes IAN CAMPBELL

TECHNOLOGY VENDORS are proffering so many types of cloud computing that they threaten to turn it to fog before it’s taken off. However, the underlying principles are consistent and almost exciting enough to justify the hype. The endgame is information and communications technology as a utility, turned on and off like water.

The idea is that businesses let service providers park their infrastructure and applications in a data centre and deliver it back to them as service. They only pay for what they use, turning technology into an operational rather than capital cost while ridding the organisation of the burden of managing and maintaining complex systems.

Sometimes described as “the consumerisation of IT”, it does for businesses what company’s like Apple with its online ecosystem of entertainment have already done for consumers.

“We’ve talked about utility computing for 20 years, and there’s been a vision to make it accessible to solve very big problems,” says Lew Tucker, chief technology officer for Cisco’s cloud computing division. “I believe in the model and a more prudent use of computing but have given up guessing the timeframe. Computing will come down to the cost of power but it remains to be seen how cheap it can get to be.”

By commoditising IT, organisations will no longer have to worry about which systems to buy or finding the people to run them. “It’s like a power plant – you don’t know whether it’s water or nuclear and you don’t care. And you no longer have to be an IT specialist to improve processes,” says Markus Pleier, chief technology officer of EMC.

“You can put everything in the cloud that doesn’t differentiate the business,” says Paul Strong, chief technology officer at VMware. “It’s potentially revolutionary because it allows you to map your business on to infrastructure at a relatively low cost. The cloud is about the democratisation of IT.”

Tempting though these scenarios are, the reality is that the journey to the cloud has barely begun. Most adoption to date has been around software as a service (SaaS), the low-hanging fruit of cloud delivery with publicly hosted applications like Salesforce.com, Google Docs and Microsoft’s Online Suite, all accessed over the web.

Elsewhere, tech-savvy start-ups and services companies are using cloud platforms like Amazon EC2 and Microsoft Azure to develop infrastructure that gives small firms the ability to scale like a multinational. But the private cloud is the nirvana that has the power to transform businesses, with each piece of infrastructure hosted in a “single tenant” environment and charged back to the organisation only when it is used. This gives them the security and level of control they crave.

Work is still to be done in this area with an absence of commercial models and a lack of standards needed to integrate the different components. Also absent is the interoperability that facilitates the easy move from one cloud provider to another.

“We’re not there yet,” says Mark McKeon, head of enterprise servers storage and networking for HP Ireland. “Vendors are at various places down the road but no one has the dynamic piece, the magic provisioning of infrastructure that you can charge for as it’s used at a granular level.”

According to IDC, about half the businesses in Europe will soon be running some sort of SaaS solution but private clouds are further away – not just in terms of vendors building them but in persuading businesses to use them. The downturn should encourage the migration, says IDC’s Chris Ingle, because organisations are increasingly stretched when it comes to managing their infrastructure. “Businesses need more flexibility in their IT infrastructure to respond to uncertain demand. The focus is still on taking cost out of IT without reducing service,” he said.

Around the time of the dotcom crash and the last recession, outsourcing saw a surge in popularity. Something similar is happening now with the cloud, says Ingle who makes the point that ultimately it’s just a new flavour of outsourcing.

The irony is that something that was originally touted as a simple cure-all is getting more complicated by the week. The industry is awash with talk of hybrid models, where organisations use a combination of public and private cloud, ably supported by vendors and services companies which integrate the different channels. For an industry that makes money from complexity, true simplicity was never an option.

There are obstacles to all of this, with security at the top of the pile. Organisations have an implicit fear of losing control over their data and are concerned about where it resides, particularly if they operate within heavily regulated sectors and have to comply with EU data protection laws. It is a major sticking point.

In the many cloud workshops held over the last weeks, you hear the schism. “The world is a virtual place. Putting rules on where data resides is unworkable,” says Chris Dedicoat, Cisco’s European senior vice-president. But regulated businesses and public sector organisations argue it’s the vendors that need to change and make themselves more transparent. Squaring off such diametrically opposed views will take time, if it happens at all.

There are also performance concerns because there are inherent latency issues if you are accessing rich content remotely. “The user experience needs to be the same or better than it is today on the desktop, otherwise businesses will tell us to forget it,” says Derek Cocker, director of HP’s converged infrastructure business. When vendors talk of a “tsunami of change” you could be forgiven for thinking that the cloud is the only option. In their quieter moments, however, they will concede that it won’t be everybody’s cup of IT.

“Not everyone will head to the cloud. For more traditional sectors, like healthcare, it’s about more than cost and there needs to be a tipping point,” says Tucker.

Ingle says heavy industries would also struggle to justify the move. “For a mining company that plans 20 years ahead, where IT infrastructure is a small percentage of its investment, the cloud is not a sensible idea.”