Up in the cloud - data management in the 21st Century

                                                                                              Shutterstock

Cloud computing is one of the current buzz words in the ICT sector and like agile working (or hot desking) its been sold to the employees, consumers and the general public as the next best thing for flexibility, cost effectiveness and efficency. However in this age of hacking, denial of service attacks and related data risk issues, is it really more spin than substance ?  What exactly is the 'cloud' ?

In simple terms, the definition of cloud computing is using a network of remote servers accessed via the internet to store, manage and process data rather than a local server or a personal computer. The advantages of cloud computing are promoted as being: no capital outlay compared to a business having to buy its own hardware; fewer IT specialists are needed to maintain and secure systems; and on-demand access to scalable computing resources suitable for any form or size of organisation. The principal disadvantage is less direct control over the computing infrastructure that runs systems and a reliance on a third party provider whom may be located in a different continent. 

There is also a criticism that cloud systems are encouraging much more energy intense activity given there is less reliance on local organisational computing and data storage capacity. To counter this impact, the use of green energy and carbon neutral programs are being used by some large cloud providers. Unfortunately much of the carbon neutral programs are little more than purchasing renewable energy certificates rather than taking direct action to reduce energy emissions.

Cloud services are delivered in three forms -

• system infrastructure as a service: being the processing power and data storage capability, 
• host and deploy applications for businesses: known as 'platform as a service',
• centrally hosted and managed software for businesses.

Cloud services can be accessed in different modes such as a public cloud (where computing services are delivered over the public internet to various companies and users). This model operates on the basis that multiple companies shared pooled resources through a group of servers although the data of each individual company is kept hidden from other users. Another model is the private cloud where there are dedicated computing resources to a single organisation over the public internet or a high speed link. While an organisation would have greater control over a private cloud, there would be higher costs for this control and security.

Major 'cloud' outages have occured in 2022 including incidents involving Google, Microsoft and Oracle and while the outages are considered to take a longer time to resolve, the impact is often described as being less severe than when a company has an internal IT failure. 

Technology research firm, Garnter, has forecast that "..worldwide end-user spending on public cloud services if forecast to grow 20.7 percent to a total of $591.8 billion in 2023 this being a clear increase from $490.3 billion in 2022".

The move to improve costs, efficiency and service quality through the "cloud" may yet prove to be a very high price when considering the loss of independence and sustainability.