The Internet itself is now seen as the problem

One of the cloud’s absolute fundamental elements, internet access, has been named as one of its fundamental weak-points in the third annual survey on cloud adoption from Managed Service Provider, Claranet. It would appear that around half of UK cloud users are concerned about the dependency of services on internet access, potentially inhibiting organisations’ experiences of cloud computing.

As Claranet is keen to point out, this does serve as a reminder of the importance of the network to any cloud services offering, and perhaps even more importantly on the fact that the price of a service is, for an increasing number of business users, actually going to be the least important factor.

One of the most important sums that all cloud users need to do now is establish the cost per hour to their business of an outage. That hour must also be the one – be it daily, weekly or even just annually – where most of the order-taking, revenue generating communications occur. How much revenue, typically, is generated at that time? If the cost savings per year in service provision are more than that hourly figure, there may be an argument to select such a service provider. If not, then paying more for a much better internet service level from the network service providers used by a cloud service provider will, in practice, nearly always prove to be profitable.

It also does demonstrate that potential cloud users need to put considerable thought into what applications and services are moved to the cloud and what needs to remain on-premise. In practice, the dividing line will vary between different types of business but can usually be generalised as being less than many users would really like, but more than many will fear is possible.

The research, which polled 300 IT decision-makers from a range of small and medium-sized businesses, and enterprises, found that 73 percent of respondents were using some form of cloud service, up from 62 percent in 2012. However, 53 percent of the cloud users stated that cloud’s dependency on internet access was a cause for concern during the migration process.

Claranet’s UK Managing Director, Michel Robert, said that working with a provider with closely integrated cloud and networking services can help to allay concerns about cloud connectivity.

“While worries about internet access haven’t held back the overall cloud adoption rate, it’s clear from these figures that there may be implications for the types of workloads and data that some businesses feel confident hosting in the cloud,” he said. “After all, these services are only as reliable and secure as the network down which they are delivered. To take but one example, business-critical accounting and finance applications, which end-users must be able to access whenever they need them, are still held on in-house infrastructure by 85 percent of organisations.

“Unreliable, unsecure networks will do little to reassure cloud users, but the connectivity question needn’t be a cause for concern when it comes to cloud provision. It’s possible to circumvent these issues by opting for an MSP that has a deep understanding of network services and has closely integrated cloud and network services. In doing so, end users need only rely on a single supplier with a single SLA for the safe delivery of their applications.”

He acknowledged that it is possible to outsource these functions to separate providers, it does require a degree of knowledge and expertise in network design and management that most business IT departments simply will not have. The minimum result of that is inducing businesses risk by encountering supplier management issues, such as managing the responsibility for uptime when it is split between two or more service providers, with separate SLAs. Most users will be unclear as to who is accountable in cases where service is disrupted or has degraded, and lacking in sufficient knowledge as to how to get the service back online.