In Canada’s first Cloud Conference (www.itcloudconference.com), a case study panel entitled “Building a Business Case for Cloud Computing,” explored the ways Canadian businesses are using the cloud, and while the results are impressive, there are major limitations to the cloud in Canada on both the supply and demand sides.
IT World Canada Editor-in-Chief Shane Schick framed the discussion by defining how cloud computing is working for Canadian businesses – which took all of five minutes. From an editorial perspective, Schick notes that new businesses and buzz words constantly being pitched, and it is easy to get lost in the hype.
The overtone was that Cloud computing in Canada has a long way to go, citing Forrester’s figure that the Cloud will see mainstream adoption in one to four years, which presents many opportunities, but also many challenges to adoption.
As Reuven Cohen noted in his presentation, there are really no clouds in Canada (although NetFirms uses cloud computing, it offers less customization than US services). This lack of infrastructure creates a problem for country-specific compliance (Canada’s Bill 198 is the equivalent of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act). “It’s happening around the globe but not happening here,” Reuven said.
While Canada has a long way to go, Canadians have been able to I Love Rewards director of development and chief software architect Farhan Thawar explained how his interesting Web 2.0 customer recognition platform has ran on Amazon EC2 since its launch in November 2007. Amazon EC2 lets him scale resources in the Cloud in order to meet demand.
Netfirms CTO Darius Antia dropped the bomb at a point when he said that for every one hundred people he knows, 99 don’t need scalability. “Clouds are nice, scalability is nice, but I think only 1 percent actually need scalability…I don’t have a need for scalability.”
For many businesses, the fact that scalability is only an issue for sites that get a high volume of visits is an elephant in the room that everyone tries to ignore. Netfirms, which mainly deals with shared hosting customers (often individuals and small businesses) that may have little knowledge about the cloud.
Obviously, server virtualization and automation helps Netfirms’ daily business, however, when it comes to communicating to customers, it doesn’t matter to clients how the hosting works as long as it works.
“To this date, we haven’t pushed the fact that we’re on a cloud,” he said. To give an example of his clients, he pointed to an ultimate fighter, who is one of his clients who actually need scalability to deal with peaks in volume.
“On Saturday nights, he beats people up. When he wins a fight, he gets lots of traffic, so the bandwidth goes through the roof….he doesn’t care what the host is running.” This is a classic case of function outweighing the underlying technology.
