However, we need to take this one step beyond simple drag and drop bridges.  Cloud computing bridges need to operate among all platforms, and need to provide modeling for both geographic load balancing, as well as a powerful disaster recovery models.  The idea a company can easily bridge and provision a cloud computing strategy through either a one stop shop with a local company, or as an alternative, making on-demand arrangements with an inter-cloud bridge to multiple companies makes the cloud argument much more compelling.

What will it take to make this “bridge” an industry reality?

There are standardization groups working within the cloud industry – one being the Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum (CCIF). The CCIF promotes the “Cloud Computing Manifesto,” which has had controversy and lack of general support within the cloud development community.  The objectives of the CCIF appear fairly benevolent, and from a user perspective actually make a lot of sense.  Those objectives focus on interoperability, security, standards, and transparency. 

This is great, unless you view it from the perspective of a cloud computing vendor, struggling to discriminate their product from the pack, ensuring one or two very large service providers and software developers do not suppress innovation or competition within the cloud marketplace.

So, we’ll consider the probability we in the early days of cloud computing and virtualization (yes, while the product is becoming mature, we are at the 1995 level of Internet development).  Think of the Internet in 1995.  It was a pretty stable protocol, and Internet networks in general ran pretty well.  We were using email, online applications, file transfers, and remote logins – not bad for the early days of Internet use.  Solid operational network, and both academic and commercial Internet networks rapidly began showing how they’d make X.25, frame relay, and even ATM-based networks irrelevant.   

Cloud computing is clearly showing its value, and is a pretty stable infrastructure.  However, unlike development of Internet protocols, cloud computing still has competing architectures and standards.  As the technology develops, and applications available from within the cloud become more powerful and useful to the community, interoperability standards will evolve. 

Much like default routes available to networks and content providers through the Internet today, a default or common denominator protocol in the cloud service provider industry will emerge that will continue to extend interoperability of data and application among cloud providers, much like a Mac is able to read and write files created by a PC (and vice versa).  The bridge between cloud service providers will be understood, and the utility of interoperability will continue to grow.

The value of Cloud Computing is in service execution

So, many companies may be concerned that if true interoperability exists, then competition will be more intense, and products will be diluted into commodity pricing.  To an extent that is true, however the true value of cloud provisioning is, and will be, in the company that understands the customer’s needs, and meets service level agreements.

Companies such as ScaleUp Technologies continue to give the cloud computing industry credibility by delivering on that promise.

Drag and drop provisioning is truly exciting, and the potential of distributed computing and disaster recovery modeling as a logical extension of drag and drop is on the boards.  This vision will be fulfilled with service provider partnerships, industry standards, and a lot of hard, creative work.

As a cloud user, or future cloud user, what is important to you?  What does the cloud service provider industry need to hear from you to make their product meet your expectations?

Let us know!

Disaster recovery and business continuity. Recovery point objectives and recovery time objectives. Backing up data to offsite locations, and potentially running mirrored processing sites – it is an expensive business requirement to fulfill. Particularly for budget conscious small and medium-sized companies.

Christoph Streit, founder of Hamburg-based ScaleUp Technologies, believes cloud computing may offer a very cost-effective, powerful solution for companies needing not only to protect their company’s data, but also reduce their recovery point objectives to near zero.

“In a traditional disaster recovery model the organization must have an exact duplicate of their hardware, applications, and data in the disaster recovery location” explains Christoph. “With cloud computing models it is possible to replicate applications virtually, spinning up capacity as needed to meet the processing requirements of the organization in the event a primary processing location becomes unavailable.”

ScaleUp did in fact demonstrate their ability to replicate databases between data centers in an October 2009 test with Cari.net, where ScaleUp was able to bring up a VPN appliance and replicate data and applications between Germany and Cari.net’s data center in San Diego, California.

While there may be issues with personal data being in compliance with European Data Protection Laws, nearly every company and organization around the world participates in a global market place. This means applications and data serving the global market cannot be considered local, and the next logical step is to extend access and presentation of the company’s network presence as close to the network edge (customers) as possible.

Some companies may have physical network capacity in multiple geographies, others may look to companies such as ScaleUp to develop relationships with other cloud service providers to allow “federated” relationships.

Until a true industry standard is determined to define data structures and protocols to use between cloud infrastructure and platform providers, it is probably easiest for relationships to develop between companies using the same cloud platform as a service (PaaS) application. Such is the case with ScaleUp and Cari.net, who used a common platform provided by 3Tera’s AppLogic.

The cloud service provider industry will provide a tremendous service to small and medium businesses which normally cannot afford near zero recovery time and recovery point objectives. Whether it is real-time replication of entire data bases, subsets of data bases, or simply parsing correlated data from edge locations at regular intervals, disaster recovery modeling is changing.

A backup location can be made in some cases by logging into a cloud service provider and opening an account with a credit card – or through a very fast negotiation with the service provider. Certainly not without cost, but potentially at a much lower cost of operation than in models requiring physical data center space, hardware, and operations staff at each location.

The important lesson for small companies is that both disaster recovery and a company’s ability to recover from either a physical disaster such as a fire in their data center, or data corruption, may limit or prevent a company’s ability to continue operations. Adding cloud services to the disaster recovery model may provide a very powerful, simplified, and cost-effective model to protect your business.