Cloud computing is not suitable for today's mission critical
enterprise applications, Hewlett-Packard chief technology officer
Russ Daniels has warned.
Although there has been a lot of industry buzz around cloud
computing, Daniels does not believe the cloud in its current form
is suitable to run enterprise application such SAP. Data accuracy
is not good enough and most applications will need to be
re-engineered to support cloud computing.
In an interview with Computer Weekly, Daniels said,
"Mission-critical applications are best run on in-house IT systems.
The cloud is not an alternative delivery model to what IT does well
today." To run economically in the cloud enterprise software will
need to be re-engineeredto protect data in a waythat allows more
than one business to sharethe same software on the same servers.
This is the model used by Salesforces.com, and allows for a
cost-effective service, he says.
Daniels warned that transactional applications running processes
such as inventory management were unsuitable for the cloud because
they cannot guarantee data accuracy. "Transaction-based
applications do not scale the more servers you throw at them, plus
you cannot afford inaccurate data such as the wrong information on
inventory," he said.
He said HP and other IT companies, governments and academics
were researching how to overcome such problems with cloud
computing.
In spite of the limitations, more than a third (36%) of UK
businesses with revenues up to £500m are planning or are
considering using cloud hosting, according to a recent survey.
It is not all doom and gloom for cloud computing, however.
Applications such as search engines work well in the cloud because
they perform better the more servers they use, saysDaniels. He says
cloud computing can also tackle some IT problems that would
previously have been too complex or too expensive.
Daniels believes cloud computing offers a way for each business
in a supply chain to publish data in the cloud, for example. A
business can then run traceability reports against this data, using
cloud computing services.
"This will provide good enough data for traceability. Cloud
computing can also be used this way by companies to determine their
carbon footprint. The cloud is very good for connecting people and
data sharing. But it should not be used for process control, where
the data needs to be perfect."