Bell Business Insights newsletter

Expert Q&A with Strahan McCarten on how changes in cloud computing can help your business

What's the best way to harness the cloud for greater IT agility and scalability? As cloud computing continues its rapid evolution, this is a question on the minds of many executives at many large and medium-sized organizations.

To clear the air on cloud computing's latest developments, its real potential and its limits, we checked in with Strahan McCarten, director of product management for Hosting and Data Centre Services. He told us recent advancements are opening up more opportunities than ever for organizations to use the cloud to crunch code, run new kinds of applications and even develop their own applications.

Bell Business Insights: What's changed in cloud computing since we last spoke in the fall of 2009?

Strahan McCarten: A lot of basic confusion is getting cleared up. For example, most organizations now understand that cloud computing offers an altogether different proposition than virtualization. While virtualization provides immediate efficiencies in how they use utilize servers and storage, the cloud offers a pay-per-use operating model that allows organizations to procure services over the Internet to run applications, crunch code or store data instead of doing it in data centers that they have to build and manage. But organizations are still wrapping their heads around the best ways to make cloud services work for them, and in what scenarios it is most effective.

BI: What makes that such a challenge?

McCarten: To begin with, the cloud is a very broad trend with many different aspects to it. It includes software-as-a-service (SaaS) like Gmail or Salesforce.com, but also HR applications and increasingly billing, project management and ERP functions. Cloud computing can also mean infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), which is when organizations add or subtract processing power or data storage on very short notice with no capital investment or ongoing management. There's even a new category of cloud computing called platform-as-a-service (PaaS), which provides a complete application development environment. The real challenge is that, as with any rapidly evolving technology trend, organizations have outdated perceptions of the cloud's shortcomings that aren't necessarily true anymore.

BI: How so?

McCarten: The biggest perceived risks to cloud computing have always been around the aspects of security, uptime guarantees, and integration challenges. Although organizations still have to select cloud computing partners carefully, these challenges are being overcome in some cases. As businesses' needs change, cloud service providers are quickly innovating to find new ways to address them. For example, there is a move among trusted providers to offer cloud services in a secure environment, so they can offer the same sort of security levels and guarantees that are available in domestic data centers.

BI: Organizations are struggling to understand how to make the cloud work for them. What scenarios are prime candidates for using the cloud?

McCarten: Some kinds of work are better suited to cloud computing than others. You have to ask yourself if latency will be a big problem, if you can tolerate any downtime, or if you have security concerns. Most cloud providers are competing on price, so they don't engineer systems for high levels of uptime, and unless you're dealing with a provider that has servers close by and can connect them via a substantial pipe, there will be some latency. But those are just a few limitations. In general, there are more reasons every day to examine whether using the cloud is a better use of IT resources.

BI: You mentioned some new trends in security, but what else do you see on the horizon for cloud computing?

McCarten: This new category of cloud services, PaaS, is really exciting. It promises to greatly improve how cloud-ready applications are developed by automating the management and the provisioning of all the tools typically used in application development. Developers will be able to focus more on just building the applications. In three or four years, PaaS will be more robust and a mainstream option.

BI: What about IaaS and SaaS, how are they changing?

McCarten: The big trend we see is that cloud services will begin offering many more features, so organizations can choose how they customize IaaS and SaaS. Even systems that are highly tailored to each organization, like billing, project management and ERP, are increasingly being serviced by the cloud. Cloud-ready apps will really proliferate in the next 12 months, with more applications using APIs so they can be provisioned over the Internet. Large and medium-sized organizations are poised to make use of a greater variety of applications and infrastructure services, and it will really shift how they think about IT.

More great resources

Are you ready for the cloud? An assessment tool

Navigating the cloud: 15 tips for a successful implementation

Read the October 2009 Business Insights interview with Strahan McCarten

About Strahan McCarten

Strahan McCarten is Director of Product Management for data centres and hosting services, including co-location and managed hosting with Bell. He has 10 years of IT management experience in both technical and sales roles, as well as 3 years in a consulting capacity. Strahan has written articles on Cloud Computing and spoken frequently at vendor and analyst conferences, and leads Bell's Cloud Computing product teams.