Cloud OS Network could break lock-in fear

Earlier this week Gartner analyst, William Maurer, made the prediction that a major consolidation in cloud services is coming. Speaking at the Gartner Datacentre Conference in the USA he suggested that about 25 percent of the top 100 IT service providers in the infrastructure space won't be around by 2015, with most of the change coming through acquisition.

The prediction comes at an interesting time, for this week also sees the introduction, by Microsoft, of the Cloud OS Network. This is a worldwide consortium of more than 25 Cloud Service Providers CSPs) delivering services built on the Microsoft Cloud Platform of Windows Server with Hyper-V, System Center and the Windows Azure Pack.

These organisations support Microsoft’s Cloud OS vision of a consistent platform that spans customer datacentres, Windows Azure and service provider clouds. To join the Cloud OS Network, these CSPs have to offer a Microsoft-validated, cloud-based infrastructure, as well as application solutions designed to meet customer needs.

Taken together these two events point to the need for cloud users, and in particular those that are about to take the plunge, to consider their decisions carefully. For example, though Maurer is predicting that acquisition will form the bulk of changes in CSPs, he suggested there will be bankruptcies as well. So making any service provision decisions now will need to be made much more on the reliability and resilience of the service provision than simple factors like cost.

According to press reports, the audience at the Gartner conference are aware that cloud service must still be considered as something of a risk. Based on their responses to an audience participation question, asking at what level do the risks associated with outsourcing some/all of your datacentre solutions to one or more of the 'aaS' models (meaning Infrastructure-as-a-Service, Software-as-a-Service, Platform-as-a-Service and others) prevent you from making the decision to move forward, around 50 percent saw cloud-based solutions offering a great deal of risk. Another 33 percent said they saw some risk, while only 12 percent felt that there was little risk.

The real concern with many cloud services, and one that has not yet really been addressed, is the fact that while it offers significant advances in operational flexibility and business agility, it can still often end up as a vendor lock-in. And not only that, but it is a lock in where both the business data and the business processes are at risk, and one where the service can just effectively disappear. At least with an on-premise environment a vendor can go under, but the users still have the application and their data and can, at least in the short-term, continue operations.

The well-documented CSP, Nirvanix, earlier this year was something of an object lesson in the problem, leaving customers with just 2 weeks to extract themselves and find a new CSP. For some of those customers, just getting their data off the service was expected to take longer than that.

That object lesson does point favourably in the direction of Microsoft’s Cloud OS Network. Yes, it may be Microsoft, and many businesses will feel that is sufficient justification to spurn it. But for many others, working with Microsoft business tools on-premise means it has an operational head start. And because it is, or at least is being pitched as, a collective of services providers offering the same base level services, it does offer a chance for users to move lock-stock-and-operational-barrel should the one they are with turn up its corporate toes. As the company’s PR pitch puts it, this is about providing with a consistent cloud platform.

“This network of leading service providers will help our customers create datacentres without boundaries for apps, data and device management,” said Takeshi Numoto, Microsoft corporate vice president of Cloud & Enterprise Marketing. “That translates into greater diversity of solutions, more flexibility and lower operational costs for customers, allowing them to focus on their core business rather than managing datacentres.”

With the Cloud OS Network, customers have the choice to deploy hybrid solutions in their datacentre, in Windows Azure or, now, through a network of service providers. Customers also benefit from uniquely tailored, fully managed services within their local market, as well as a high degree of technical consistency across environments, which prevents vendor lock-in and enables flexibility.

As a result, customers can focus on increasing efficiencies, improving employee productivity and lowering operational costs.

This is also an opportunity for CSPs, as cloud adoption accelerates. They can focus on delivering value-added services to meet customer demand for hybrid cloud solutions. By joining Microsoft in the Cloud OS Network, they can cost-effectively develop new services, attract new customers and increase revenues. With the Microsoft Cloud Platform, service providers have access to the capabilities of and best practices from Windows Azure.

Organisations already signed up for the Cloud OS Network cover more than 90 active markets around the world, serve more than 3 million customers every day and operate over 2.4 million servers in more than 425 datacentres. They include, among others, Alog, Aruba S.p.A., Capgemini, Capita IT Services, CGI, CSC, Dimension Data, DorukNet, Fujitsu Finland Oy., Fujitsu Ltd., iWeb, Lenovo, NTTX, Outsourcery, OVH.com, Revera, SingTel, Sogeti, TeleComputing, Tieto, Triple C Cloud Computing, T-Systems, VTC Digilink and Wortmann AG.