Cloud computing: the false, fud and federated

Last week, Amazon.com Chief Technology Officer, Werner Vogels, gave a talk to students at the Singapore Management University.
Facilitated by the Singapore Government’s lead ICT agency – the Infocomm Development Agency (IDA), the subject was cloud computing.
You’re not likely to get much push back from perhaps the world’s leading provider of infrastructure-as-a-service, but to the unconverted (ie. me) there was enough in there to convince that the zeitgeist is not large, hard-to-manage and expensive-to-run integrated IT systems.
Globally, we are already seeing large cloud environs opening up in the public sector, and Vogels stated where the diametrically-opposed lines are drawn. As day is to night, so will ‘old IT’ be to ‘new IT’. Vogels talks about different clouds too - the private cloud, the false cloud.
“I always class the things that are happening in cloud computing with the new world of IT, old style IT was about really complex interfaces,” he says, “very long-term contracts just to get a good price on a piece of enterprise software that you want to build.
“Old style IT would make software really complex: the cost of moving away from the deep complex integrated systems would be too high - you couldn’t walk away from it.”
Cloud computing is about “giving control to the customer. It’s a simple storage service,” he adds.
Simple it might be, but despite all of its obvious pros – cost-efficiency, scaleability and so on – the ‘myths’ which surround cloud not only persist but are frequently perpetuated, and in some cases are holding governments back.
Vogels says. “There are a lot of myths floating around about cloud computing in general, a lot of FUD - Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt: ‘the cloud’s not secure’, ‘the cloud is not viable’, ‘it’s only about money’.”
A report published by The Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering (ATSE) to the Federal Government last month warned: “the use of cloud services raises new issues in regard to privacy, security, trust, data transfer capacity and lock-in with service providers.
“Privacy legislation which pre-dates the development of cloud-based services needs to be reviewed”.
The software-as-a-service market is also now so stifling that the private sector has united to address interoperability issues around the cloud.
Formed last week, the Open Data Alliance Centre – which includes 70 of the world’s biggest companies – set about the lofty aim of unifying standards for technology.
The argument goes that systems that do not work together are holding back the spread of cloud computing.
As a block, the 70 represent a staggering $50bn of global IT spend, so it’s a significant watershed in the growth arc of cloud computing that such a stand is being made.
So now add to security and viability, the problem of interoperability.
What about governments and the much-talked-about G-cloud? Should governments be discussing ways to include all product vendors in terms of the software used to provide infrastructure-as-a-service? Or developing open source options too?
For one thing, cloud has brought government departments into the same fold - they know they are moving into a new paradigm of collaboration and service delivery and are weighing up all of the options.
Is there a good argument for broaching vendors about their own cloud concerns and strategies? If, for nothing else, to avoid the duplication they so often berate about their legacy systems.