Cloudy Weather

Theres been more clouds in the news this week, its seems that some companies are wary of entering the cloud.
This is a good thing, after all any data put into the cloud is akin to leaving your company laptop on a train in my opinion.
Now, lets get something straight, there are some instances where a distributed network infrastructure is a good thing, it can give you greater resilence and comfort from knowing that in the event of an emergency your data will not be destroyed and that you can get your company back up and running fairly quickly, however the use of the cloud is not a substitue for a good, well tested disaster recovery plan, something that not all organisations have, and not something that all companies test.
Previous posts have detailed certain aspects of the cloud that I am not happy with, primarily the notion that moving into the cloud is somehow "greener" than your current setup.
A lot of the big consultancies state that cloud computing services ARE greener than your current set up but this is not true, every paper I've seen come with caveats that are so wide as to be meaniless, not all companies have the amount of equipment required, not all companies use IT services in the same way, so care should be taken when reading these articles and papers.
The cloud is not green for the following reasons:

1.You will still need computing power locally in order to access cloud services, these will be your local authentication services and of course access to file and print servers with data that you dare not place into a public and relatively unsecure domain. This local compute power will of course remain within the local Data Centre that has not had many of its servers removed to the cloud and as a result the PUE of said data centre will go up (more ancillary power, less compute power)
2. Cloud data centres although energy efficient, are additions to computing estate, therefore requiring additional energy provision, not green.
Carbon3IT is designing a distributed truly green cloud solution and will publish our concept document when available.


Next Week, we will be attending a low carbon technologies event in Birmingham and we have a meeting to discuss some project at a University in the West Midlands.

We rather enjoyed last nights Rugby and are looking forward to the rest of the weekends games including the Superbowl on Sunday Night.

Have a good weekend.