June 24

Head in a Cloud? Late last year, a client asked me to write an article about “cloud computing,” an emerging technology. As I noted in the piece, cloud computing, not even on the radar screen a few years ago, is now a fast-growing trend. All the major players from Amazon and Google to IBM, Dell, and Hewlett-Packard (HP) are jumping on the bandwagon and creating a vision of how and where they’re going to play in this new arena. Even drug companies, such as Pfizer, Eli Lilly & Co., Johnson & Johnson, and Genentech, which have a reputation for sometimes being behind the technology curve, are involved in pilot projects, according to Rick Mullin of Chemical & Engineering News. 

What exactly is a cloud? Its name comes from the cloud symbol on a network designer’s flowchart, indicating that a packet of information is being sent through the Internet. As BusinessWeek online suggests, “cloud computing” can include both software as a service (think Salesforce.com), as well as storage and server capacity, delivered over the Internet, on demand, from massive data centers.

This sounds pretty intriguing, doesn’t it? No more servers to maintain and upgrade; software available at the click of a mouse. No more IT headaches.

Not so fast. Don’t get me wrong. The “cloud” has enormous positive implications and will surely change the way we think about and use traditional IT. Before jumping in with both feet, though, it seems to me that potential adopters need to think about a couple of things.

Your data – all that valuable information about customers and your business – will be stored on a huge computer, somewhere else. Where is the somewhere? Is it in a foreign country? Is it in Silicon Valley on a fault line? Are there redundant back-up sites? What happens if a terrorist or a plain old natural disaster compromises the Internet for an extended period of time? Is the data safe and protected? Who owns this big processing machine? If it were to go bankrupt or be acquired by another company, what’s the process for getting your data back?

Tough questions like these require some serious risk assessment.

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