Enterprise 2.0 Panelists: Get On With The Cloud Already

In a "customer visit" session kicking off the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston Monday evening, executives from IBM, Google, and EMC laid out their companies' cloud computing value propositions and then fielded questions from a handful of potential buyers. Much has changed -- and still much hasn't -- from the first "Evening In The Cloud" session at Enterprise 2.0 a year ago.Cloud computing is on its way to the mainstream. Interoperability standards are starting to develop, though slowly. Products are emerging from a wider variety of entrenched and startup vendors, some of which (Amazon, Salesforce, Google, IBM, EMC, Microsoft, and others) have established their long-term commitment to cloud computing. And the "cloud" itself is more sophisticated as vendors erect world-class data centers in diverse locations and customers get more ubiquitous broadband access. Customers are less preoccupied than they were with rudimentary definitions-what is the cloud exactly?-and are more focused on deliverables.

But if the small "customer" panel assembled for Monday night's session is any indication, questions remain about security, cost, and especially regulatory compliance. After a question about security, the vendor panel essentially punted, with IBM's Sean Poulley, VP of online collaboration services, saying over and over that "the customer is always liable." In fairness to Poulley, cloud security isn't a 5-minute panel session conversation.

While maintaining that Google Apps are invariably cheaper to buy and manage than premises-based applications, Rajen Sheth, who invented Goole Apps and is now the suite's senior product manager, said "the most interesting aspect of the cloud isn't the cost. It's the pace of innovation" -- the continuous improvements rolled out to customers at once in centrally managed upgrades. Besides, Sheth said, "running your own infrastructure is a drag."

Mike Feinberg, senior VP of cloud infrastructure at EMC, emphasized the need for integrated, "federated" services that let customers keep some of their data and applications behind the firewall while moving certain other IT resources into the cloud. "Maybe for historical, religious, or regulatory reasons, not all data can live on the Internet," Feinberg said.

The devil of cloud computing is often in the regulatory compliance detail, and one of the customers at the session, Doug Cornelius, chief compliance officer with Beacon Capital Partners, described himself as the devil-the lawyer whose job is to say "no" to his company's cloud dalliances. Cornelius is especially concerned about geography: Where are those cloud data centers exactly so that his company doesn't run afoul of always-changing state, national, regional, and industry data privacy and access laws? And there are some countries you just want to avoid for reasons of political, economic, and social instability, he noted. A nebulous cloud, where data lives somewhere in the ether, might be fine for a kid storing photos, but it won't cut it for most enterprises.

The problem, said IBM's Poulley, is that cloud technology "is moving faster than the law." Panelists referred specifically to the U.S. Patriot Act and the EU privacy directive as complex and onerous. Ultimately, CIOs and other business technology execs considering moving some of their data and apps into the cloud--or seeking "incremental value" with brand new services such as cloud-based conferencing--face a risk management decision, Poulley said. "If you wanted this to be ultimately safe, you wouldn't do all this stuff," he said. "But if you wanted to be ultimately safe, you wouldn't get out of bed in the morning."

Pulley stressed Big Blue's enterprise chops -- its $20 billion business running the high-performance infrastructures of banks, telecom carriers, and other big customers; its 20 cloud computing data centers; its service and support. But even though IBM is starting to roll out cloud-based software and infrastructure services for enterprise customers and says the cloud will pervade every one of its businesses, he noted that if every old IT architecture died when a new one emerged, IBM wouldn't be selling more mainframes today than ever before. So IBM's job often is to protect its existing customers' investments, he said.

Poulley said there's "a much larger social demographic at play here that will cause the shift" to cloud computing--namely, the younger generations are more comfortable in the cloud. Referring to a recent New York Times article, he compared the social divide around data sharing to the gulf separating the rock 'n roll generation from previous ones. At some point soon, he said, the whole question "to cloud or not to cloud" will be moot.