Best Practice: Cloud Computing

Red sky at morning, sailor take warning.

Here’s a forecast: clouds are rolling in. Architecting for cloud computing will, very soon, become a conscious best practice.

There are lots of handy objections to Cloud Computing: Regulatory compliance, geographic containment requirements, taxes, liability, vendor lock-ins and lack of standards. Many are brushing off cloud technologies as a result, and maybe rightly so… for about another minute, anyway.

Last year, I was involved in a client’s effort to re-provision an application from an in-house infrastructure to a SaaS vendor. All told, the effort was risky and enormous. The administration of it took a year. It took a team of talented engineers from several different companies over six months to implement the transfer. When it was done, everyone breathed a sigh of relief.

The amazing part was that it wasn’t about changing applications. It was just changing who hosted the application. Simply put, no one had the fore-sight to architect for a transition of this nature, and so the ROI was heavily diluted.

Market fluctuations, re-focused specialization, business units changing hands, economic right-sizing, disaster recovery; there are many reasons agile infrastructures can be useful. Cloud computing technology is evolving quickly and has the very real potential to offer agility at a dramatically lower cost, if you’re prepared to leverage it. You don’t have to go in to the cloud to see what you might gain from it. The important part is preparing for it so you can use it when it makes sense for you. And, you could even go green at the same time.

I won’t try to predict what your organization has to gain by architecting around cloud technology. It’s more about what your organization is at risk of losing if you don’t.