Does cloud computing mean I need to seperate hardware and software?

Cloud computing people are telling me to separate my applications from my hardware; what is that all about?

In small to medium enterprises, the temptation is to lump "IT" into a single bucket. Your IT staff, if you have them, look after your business systems, servers and PCs.

The danger with this approach in the new age of "cloud services" is that you and your people get stuck trying to work out an IT strategy that takes advantage of the idea that there is all this stuff out there in the cloud that doesn't require any infrastructure, and is therefore supposed to be cheaper.

But the reality is that it is going to be at least three to five years before every business application you need is available in the cloud and you don't need any more infrastructure of your own.

In the meantime, what do the smart companies do?

The answer lies in understanding that you, as a business owner or CIO, need to stay focused on procuring, implementing and continuously improving business systems that support every part of your business, using whatever IT applications are most appropriate for your budget and your business vision.

And for the next three to five years, the underlying infrastructure is going to be mixed. Some of your applications will need a server to live on, some of them can be hosted in a shared (virtual) or standalone environment, and some of them will be in the cloud.

And you need to have an infrastructure platform that lets you nimbly and cost effectively move from one to the other according to the needs of the applications that are supporting your business.

In the next few weeks Microsoft applications will become available as cloud-based solutions via Telstra. These should include Exchange Server, SharePoint Server and CRM.

(I would love to hear your comments on the Microsoft-Telstra hook-up, which is unique to Australia. Anywhere else where hosted Microsoft apps are available, it is done directly via Microsoft, but here in Australia I figure Microsoft lacked the infrastructure and so decided to partner up with Telstra. Good move or bad? Will you pay Telstra to access Microsoft applications?)

We now need to consider the cost and advantage of keeping these services in-house versus simply connecting.

As an example of the technical complexity thrown up here; we have not yet seen integration between Salesforce.com and a cloud exchange server. If you are already committed to Salesforce.com, you are probably better off selecting a traditional in-house exchange server or a hosted equivalent. This may change at short notice once testing of the cloud based environment is done.

In a situation where you want to use the cloud exchange solution, a short term deployment of a virtual hosted exchange server could be the key to rapid deployment with options to switch quickly once the desired service is tested and available.

This is a new age in technology, as the stuff in the cloud becomes the equivalent of the tools we have been using for years and scales down into micro businesses to give them everything their larger competitors have. In-house IT staff may struggle to keep up with the rate of change here, and may not have the advice business decision makers need.

So separate your IT infrastructure provision and outsource it. Buy what you need when you need it from experts who will maintain whatever is needed to keep your business systems running effectively.

Focus your internal IT energy (with help from experts as needed) on the applications layer - choosing the business systems that have the functionality you need and implementing business processes that make you the best business you can be.


David Markus is the founder of Melbourne's IT services company Combo. His focus is on big picture thinking to create value in IT systems for the SME sector.