With managed services, it is important to build in realistic expectations on both the savings and the performance side for those running an enterprise that moves to hosted technology.
Overall, hosted applications when deployed where it fits with your needs can be a very powerful solution to vault an enterprise into high levels of operation in short order at a limited cost. BUT don’t expect the cloud to provide five nines of availability and don’t expect it to be a default solution for those wanting cost competitiveness. Just like most other situations, expect the unexpected.
One outage for the span of a few hours could eat up a measurable piece of your companies profit for a quarter… On July 20, 2008 Amazon.com suffered a catastrophic outage in its 83 hosted storage business. It impacted thousands of businesses and individuals who had gone to S3 as a easy, cost-effective way to store lots of data easily.
And over the past several months Google as suffered notable outages in its Gmail and Goodnews that have been completely unexplained.
When considering a cloud application/managed service.. consider these things.. A complete audit and forecast of the business involved to develop a cost benefit-risk analysis on an application by application basis for a move to a hosted computing model vs traditional client/server-data center models. An audit of the cloud service with a focus on issues including geographic redundancy, latency, patekt transport performance and update guarantees. An audit of the business’ own ISPs including performance at connecting points between carriers including AT&T, Verizon and others to determine potential future performance issues. A determination of whether the cloud based application or service shares bandwidth with other companies that are resource hogs. While most cloud services imply shared resources (which makes them so economical) having a small bicycle shop share resources with a Wall Street brokerage might have negative consequence for the bike shop. Constant monitoring of these performance issues, once hosted solutions are up up running…
Really, just be aware of above. The big (non -free) good companies you are not running into that many problems. Companies like Amazon & Google I would stay away from for cloud type things.. but things like Salesforce or Trend Micro or a bunch of other managed services… different story morning glory. Just be aware of some of those best practices above.
