CLOUD, FOG, OR SMOG?

CLOUD, FOG, OR SMOG?

OUR FORECAST ON BUSINESS
CONTINUITY AND THE CLOUD

1 | ® 2012 StorageCraft. All rights reserved.

INTRODUCTION

You can’t go anywhere in the IT world these days without This paper was adapted from a
hearing about the “cloud.” It seems to be everywhere, in every keynote address delivered at SMB
new product, the solution to every problem. Nation 2011 by Matt Urmston.
But as with any hot new trend, you’re probably wondering Matt has worked in the IT industry
if the cloud, cloud computing, or cloud-based backup for more than twenty years, focusing
live up to the hype. Is this something you should use on backup, disaster recovery, and
yourself? If you’re a managed service provider (MSP) or archiving solutions. He has worked
a value-added reseller (VAR), is it something you should as a technical marketing manager, a
recommend to your clients? sales engineer, a product manager,
and as an independent consultant
Before you jump in, you need to know how the cloud is for Legato/EMC. Currently, he is
positioned today, understand its many value propositions, senior technical product manager
and look at how you can get the most out of it in your own for StorageCraft Technology
business. Corporation.


ARE THERE BRIGHT SKIES AHEAD?

If you listen to the marketers of the world, using the cloud for backup, Customers can maintain business continuity in the case of a
storage, and disaster recovery seems like a no-brainer. site disaster.
A simple Internet search yields countless testimonials on its Even though most “disasters” are smaller in scope, businesses
manifold benefits, some of which might include the following: always need to prepare for the possibility of a large-scale
disruption of their site. Everything from hurricanes to tornados
to construction trucks accidently driving through an office have
Customers are not dependent on a single server.
demolished businesses in the past and they will continue doing so
Data stored in the cloud can be distributed across a wide array in the future. Having data stored in the cloud protects it from such
of servers, which are often geographically disparate. Since every on-site disasters.
machine will fail sooner or later, storing data in the cloud seems to
offer good protection.
Customers can provision virtual storage containers that are
larger than the physical space available.
Customers have no direct hardware dependency.
The advent of virtual technology has made it possible for cloud
In addition to not having to worry about the failure of a single adopters to create storage that is larger than the physical server
server, cloud adopters don’t necessarily need to have any hardware that’s hosting it, cutting costs.
on-site. This can reduce costs, among other benefits.
Customers can access all of their storage from a single inter-
Customers can purchase and expand cloud services face anywhere in the world.
dynamically.
Whether it’s on a computer, a smart phone, or some other device,
Whether a cloud adopter is purchasing storage for the first time or cloud adopters have access to their data anywhere.
growing what they currently have, the pay-as-you go model makes
it easy to get just the right amount. This applies not only to storage
space, but to hardware and to dedicated IT staff as well.


OR JUST THUNDER CLOUDS?

Looking at these benefits, it’s easy to get swept away by the • Amazon Cloud Goes Down, Takes Every Hot Startup
cloud. With It2
Unfortunately, there’s thunder on the horizon. The truth • Google, Microsoft cloud crashes: Is this the new
is that there’s still a lot of uncertainty about the cloud. For normal?3
example, Larry Ellison, the CEO of Oracle, recently told • Why Amazon’s cloud Titanic went down4
the Wall Street Journal, • EMC Atmos Goes Offline5
The interesting thing about cloud computing is that • Apple MobileMe gets De-Mobilized6
we’ve redefined cloud computing to include everything • Gmail outage passes 24 hours for some7
that we already do. I can’t think of anything that isn’t The consistency with which major cloud providers have
cloud computing with all of these announcements…. failed is alarming and some experts predict that it will
Maybe I’m an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is only get worse. According to Gartner, “By 2014, a major
talking about. What is it? It’s complete gibberish. It’s cloud-computing service provider will suffer a cascading
insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?1 failure, resulting in unrecoverable data loss and permanent
business impact for multiple customers.”8
Ellison’s quote appears in an article called “Oracle’s Ellison
Nails Cloud Computing,” suggesting the CEO is not alone
in his suspicions and confusion. But the darkened sky is
more than simply uncertainty at the proper way to use the
latest marketing buzzword. In practice, the cloud has run
into some serious problems. Consider, for example, this
small selection of headlines from the last few years:


THE TRUTH ABOUT CLOUD ADOPTION

Of course, what we’ve shown so far are the extremes. Of that, however, only 39 percent will be using paid
services. And 64 percent of those paying for the cloud will
As with every emerging technology, there are loud voices only pay for three services or fewer.9
pushing for adoption, frustrated voices complaining about
failure, and the truth somewhere in between. The survey also reveals other telling features of the cloud as
it is and will be in the near future.
A cloud adoption study published by Microsoft in 2011
offers a good perspective. Eighty-two percent of the respondents claimed that buying
a cloud service from a local provider was important, and
They surveyed 3,258 companies globally with between those who did purchase services from local providers
two and two hundred and fifty employees and asked them were more likely to use paid services.10 At the same time,
about how they were currently using the cloud and how those who don’t plan on paying for cloud services were
they expected to use the cloud in the future. Microsoft more concerned about control than anything else. Fifty-
identified nine specific services that could be adopted seven percent wanted to keep things in house because they
in the cloud (including accounting software, project believed they’d have better control.11
management, and data storage and backup) and asked
participating companies to evaluate their current usage Fifty-three percent said they wouldn’t acquire cloud
of these services, as well as their projected usage in three services because they simply didn’t know enough about
years. The survey also distinguished between free cloud them to make a good decision.12
services and paid ones.
In summarizing the study, Marco Limena, vice president
The results clearly demonstrate the patchy adoption of of business channels for Worldwide Communications
cloud services thus far. Sector at Microsoft, assessed the current and future state
of cloud computing: “Cloud adoption will be gradual, and
For example, at the time of the survey, 66 percent of the SMBs will continue to operate in a hybrid model with an
respondents used some kind of cloud service (free or paid). increasing blend between off-premises and traditional on-
Within three years, that number will grow to 74 percent. premises infrastructure, for the foreseeable future.”13


PARTLY CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE
OF RAIN

It’s difficult for anyone these days to navigate this current a solution provider, you need to be ready with the cloud
state of the cloud. Which technologies do you adopt? How story you’re going to tell.
deeply do you invest? Is the technology ready for you to jump
in all the way? At StorageCraft, our forecast for the cloud is simply this:
partly cloudy with a chance of rain. In other words, cloud
For MSPs and VARs, the question is even more computing isn’t going to go away, but it is going to grow
complicated. Not only do you need to figure out which slowly and is still fraught with potential risks. As such,
cloud technologies will work best for your own business, we’ve prepared a number of recommendations for partners
but you need to determine how cloud offerings fit into your who are looking to push forward:
products and services as well.
• Be the expert (or find a partner who is).
The high-level summary of these various studies is that • Understand the cloud provider’s SLAs.
businesses will be slow to embrace cloud computing and
• Build solutions that meet client needs and budget.
when they do, they’ll still maintain some kind of on-site
backup. At the same time, when they do adopt, it will • Don’t rush.
likely be from local, trusted sources. This means that as


BE THE EXPERT (OR FIND A PARTNER
WHO IS)

Consider again this statistic from the Microsoft study:
53% of respondents agreed with the statement “I don’t
know enough about cloud computing to be able to make
decisions about using cloud service.”
This is a significant percentage and it underscores the need
for MSPs and VARs to become the experts, to become
proficient at educating their clients in the ramifications
of the cloud. The businesses described by this quote are
simply sitting back and waiting for someone to help them
understand the trend. If you’re not an expert, or haven’t
partnered with someone who is, then you’re missing your
chance to educate that client and meet his or her need.
Clients are coming to you to tell them what to do when it
comes to their backup and disaster recovery. They don’t
have the time to become experts on the cloud, so if you’re
going to offer it, you need to fill that role. And if you can’t
(or choose not to), be sure to partner with a cloud provider
who can.


UNDERSTAND THE CLOUD
PROVIDER’S SLAs

Most IT service providers guarantee a specific level of service Not only is the client’s data completely lost, but if they Where SLAs Break Down
to their customers. Whether it’s 99.9% uptime, no data loss, do not remove the corrupted file, they’ll continue to pay Hello,
or guaranteed replication to another server, these service storage charges. Imagine having to explain this data loss to
level agreements (SLAs) are crucial to how the provider your own clients. A few days ago we sent you an
operates. email letting you know that we
As important as it is to understand the SLAs of the
In fact, in many cases, the SLA becomes the differentiator providers you’re partnering with, it’s just as important to were working on recovering
between one organization and another. recognize that no SLA is completely bullet proof. This is an inconsistent data snapshot
that chance of rain in our forecast and frankly, you need to of one or more of your Storage
When looking to partner with cloud providers, then, it’s be the umbrella. volumes. We are very sorry, but
vital that you understand those SLAs and evaluate which ultimately our efforts to manually
offers the best service for your needs. If you are going to be Consider each SLA and look for points of weakness, then recover your volume were
offering cloud services to your own clients through a third bolster your own offering to protect your own clients. unsuccessful. The hardware failed
party, then you need to know exactly what you’re offering. As one Amazon customer told its own clients, “Our in such a way that we could not
development team is also hard at work to limit the impact forensically restore the data.
At the same time, it’s just as important that you take all of any future AWS interruptions.”15 Don’t wait until after a
SLAs with a grain of salt. Some guarantees are virtually disaster to implement procedures that control the way your What we were able to recover has
impossible to enforce. For example, what if your cloud cloud provider affects your clients. been made available via a snapshot,
provider goes out of business? Imagine you’ve moved all of although the data is in such a state
your own data or the data of your clients into storage with that it may have little to no utility...
a cloud provider that files for bankruptcy. How can they
possibly meet their promised level of service then? If you have no need for this
When Amazon’s EC2 cloud service crashed in 2011, the snapshot, please delete it to avoid
fallibility of SLAs became apparent. The letter reprinted incurring storage charges.
in the sidebar is one Amazon sent to a client following the
crash (as reported on MSNBC). We apologize for this volume loss
and any impact to your business.

Sincerely,14


BUILD SOLUTIONS THAT MEET CLIENT
NEEDS AND BUDGET

It should be apparent by now that the cloud is not a one-size- requirements of many executives to back up to the cloud
fits-all solution. without relinquishing control of your customer’s data to a
third party. With a corporate cloud, you still have complete
As such, it is imperative that you understand your control. Unfortunately, with a corporate cloud, you take on
customers’ business models, their needs, and their budgets all the cost and risk yourself, which is no small thing.
as you create solutions to move their data to the cloud.
Within the context of those needs and budgets, you can then The third option, of course, is simply replicating to the
work to build a backup and disaster recovery plan that takes cloud. There are many benefits to this, but it’s important
advantage of the cloud, but still protects them from the rain. to remember that once you replicate data to a third party
cloud provider, you’re no longer in control of it. You can’t
To start out, we always recommend that you include a go into their cloud environment and do failovers or test
local backup in your plan. That way, if your cloud provider restores with your own data. There are a few services
goes out of business or has that major cascading failure that allow this, but not many. As you make your cloud
predicted by Gartner, your data is protected. Once you plan, then, you need to be sure that you’re meeting your
have that local copy, you can create an off-site solution. customer’s needs. If all they need is to transfer their data to
The traditional off-site model is to simply replicate to a the cloud, then it may be the perfect solution. If, however,
data center somewhere. Whether you’re using a colocation they need to recover that data quickly, if their recovery
center or simply storage at your office or home, the data time objective is a day or less, then the cloud may not
center model allows you to recover easily from a site- work. The time it takes to pull data back from the cloud,
specific disaster. Data centers are not technically a cloud whether over the Internet or by some other route, may be a
solution and it does not offer many of those benefits, but deal breaker.
they are still a perfectly respectable and reliable solution. Of course you could always mix these options, replicating
A second solution is to create a corporate cloud. This is a your local backup to a data center, for instance, and then
hybrid approach. Here, you’ve taken your corporate cloud replicating it into the cloud. In any event, it’s imperative as
and virtualized it so you can quickly provision machines you create your cloud offering that you understand what
and work with elastic data sets. This allows for dynamic your customer actually needs. Each of the options offers
growth and the manipulation of images you’ve moved there. different benefits and drawbacks and you won’t do yourself
You can spin them up, restore them to a virtual or physical any favors trying to force a solution on a client that doesn’t
machine and so on. A corporate cloud even allows you to meet their needs. No one likes to be sold something they
test disaster recovery plans. A corporate cloud can meet don’t need.


DON’T RUSH

Most people think about the cloud like it’s an application.
You buy it, you install it, and that’s it. But that’s not really
how it works.
Using the cloud is really a phased process. Once you
understand the needs of your customers, you can provide
solutions that allow them to take advantage of the cloud as
they truly need it.
The research presented in this paper suggests that cloud
adoption is going to happen slowly, as users gradually
move business-line applications to the cloud as needed.
This allows them to get a sense of the benefits the cloud is
actually providing in a measured and controlled way.
As an MSP or VAR, you should do the same. You don’t
need to throw everything into the cloud all at once (partly
cloudy, remember?). You can take the time to learn how
cloud computing really fits into your offering and how it
can meet the needs of your customers.


GETTING OUT OF THE SMOG

The truth is that for all the hype about its benefits, the cloud
is not yet living up to its promises for many people.
That doesn’t mean it will never meet those expectations,
but right now we should consider it for what it is: an
emerging group of technologies that have promise but that
are still trying to figure out exactly how they work. With
that perspective, we can be smart. We can take our time,
and we can develop cloud strategies that meet the needs of
our clients and that make sense.


NOTES

1. Dan Farber, “Oracle’s Ellison nails cloud computing,” 7. Seth Weintraub, “Gmail outage passes 24
CNET News, September 26, 2008, http://news.cnet. hours for some (updated),” CNNMoney,
com/8301-13953_3-10052188-80.html. February 28, 2011, http://tech.fortune.cnn.
2. Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, “Amazon Cloud Goes com/2011/02/28/gmail-outage-passes-24-hours-
Down, Takes Every Hot Startup With It,” Business for-some/?section=magazines_fortune&utm_
Insider, April 21, 2011, http://www.businessinsider. source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_ca
com/why-is-reddit-down-2011-4. mpaign=Feed%3A+rss%2Fmagazine
s_fortune+%28Fortune+Magazine%29.
3. Kevin McCaney, “Google, Microsoft cloud crashes:
Is this the new normal?” Washington Technology, 8. Jay Heiser, “Will Your Data Rain When the Cloud
September 13, 2011, http://washingtontechnology. Bursts?,” Gartner, September 24, 2010, ID Number:
com/articles/2011/09/12/google-microsoft-cloud- G00206825.
outages.aspx. 9. “SMB Cloud Adoption Study Dec 2010—Global
4. David Goldman, “Why Amazon’s cloud Titanic went Report.” Microsoft, March 24, 2011. 7.
down,” CNNMoney, April 22, 2011, http://money. 10. Ibid. 17.
cnn.com/2011/04/22/technology/amazon_ec2_ 11. Ibid. 16.
cloud_outage/index.htm.
12. Ibid.
5. Dave Raffo, “EMC Atmos Online goes offline,
13. “Microsoft unveils findings from its SMB Cloud
other cloud storage providers look to step.
Adoption Study,” Microsoft, March 24, 2011, http://
up,” SearchCloudStorage, July 2, 2010, http://
www.microsoft.com/presspass/emea/presscentre/
searchcloudstorage.techtarget.com/news/1516117/
pressreleases/MSSMBCloudAdoption.mspx.
EMC-Atmos-Online-goes-offline-other-cloud-
storage-providers-look-to-step-up. 14. Henry Blodgett, “Amazon’s cloud crash destroyed
many customers’ data,” Technolog on MSNBC,
6. Andrew R. Hickey, “10 Notable Cloud Outages and
April 28, 2011, http://technolog.msnbc.msn.com/_
What Caused Them,” slide 1, “Apple MobileMe Gets
news/2011/04/28/6549775-amazons-cloud-crash-
De-mobilized,” CRN, February 23, 2010, http://www.
destroyed-many-customers-data.
crn.com/slide-shows/applications-os/223100370/10-
notable-cloud-outages-and-what-caused-them. 15. Ibid.
htm?pgno=4.


ABOUT STORAGECRAFT

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