PRESS ROOM: PRESS COVERAGE

CSIA Event Discusses Promise and Pitfalls of the Cloud

As reported on RockyRadar.com

June 26, 2009

CSIA’s breakfast event hosted at the Denver offices of Holland and Hart brought together experts to discuss “Cloud Computing – Perspectives and Applications.” The discussion featured Alan Gin, CEO of ZeroNines, and Jake Smith of Intel. While both offered glimpses into their deep technical knowledge, both of the presentations focused more on the business demands, requirements and limitations that will likely fuel the rate and extent of adoption of cloud computing at the enterprise level.

Gin, who has been active in the cloud computing arena from its conception, began by noting that “downtime is more costly than ever before” and that downtime creates not only lost productivity but can in fact damage a brand irreparably. To this end, Gin points to the substantial defection from Bank of America after its ATM system experienced several days of downtime. Employees and customers alike care little about where a program is hosted – be it in an external cloud (e.g. Microsoft Azure), internal enterprise cloud, or on a traditional server - but rather that the program is “highly available and always up.” Gin noted that the trend of server consolidation actually increases catastrophic risk because more data is actually housed on any given machine. If implemented correctly, cloud computing has the capability to render exactly the opposite impact on risk.

Gin also spent some time discussing ZeroNine’s product offering which uses the motto “always available.” The company’s solution mixes cloud computing with physical hosting at great distances (to ensure a single natural disaster could not bring down all hosting sites) and multisychronization providing the ability to automatically switch among the different sites and thus providing seamless functionality as long as one of the hosting sites is online.

To Smith, the opportunity of the cloud is in reducing the costs of IT infrastructure maintenance, which currently eats up $7 of every $8 spent on IT. Smith was equally adamant that “Turning [all IT] over to the cloud is suicide,” and instead advocated a hybrid approach which includes external cloud providers (e.g. Amazon) and an enterprise’s internal cloud. Smith urged evaluating core competencies which should remain internal, but also possessing a willingness to let go of what lies outside the core to external providers: “Should your IT department really be managing an expense reporting system?” Among the key enablers to the move to the cloud, Smith included standard protocols and virtualization.

CSIA, the state’s largest technology association, provides programs, workshops and major events to create connections, portals for information, as well as leadership about key issues in the industry. The next CSIA event, which is being co-hosted by CORE, will be “Green IT: Practical, Profitable and Driving a Sustainable Future” held on Wednesday, July 8 at 7:30 am.

Copyright RockyRadar.com, 2009