We are being told cloud is cheaper but what about its environmental impact – are the clouds green?

It would seem that cloud computing is the natural way to go for the sake of nature. I am basing my response on a study commissioned by Microsoft, and conducted by WSP and Accenture, that was published in November 2010. This study discovered that energy savings of up to 30% could be attained by moving from local servers in server rooms to equivalent hosted solutions.

A result I found most interesting was that the smaller the organisation considered, the more effective the energy reduction proved to be; as small businesses have almost the same resources as larger organisations without the scalability to reduce consumption per head. For a business of 100 people, the gains are as much as 90%, while for larger enterprises the reductions dipped to 30% (which is still significant).

When we look at the motivation to conserve energy, large data centres as run by Microsoft and Amazon are highly motivated to innovate to reduce cost at a wholesale level. But, a small business or small corporate data centre lacks the motivation or budget to innovate to reduce costs. So cloud computing creates the need for the innovation required.

According to the report, the power reduction comes from four key areas:

• Dynamic Provisioning: This means that as resources are required by a specific client they are assigned in the data centre, and when they are no longer needed they are claimed back. In this way, many clients scale up and down on the same set of resources elastically.
• Multi Tenancy: This allows multiple businesses and multiple people to share the same infrastructure for the same application, ensuring reduced surplus equipment is used.
• Server Utilisation: Standard servers are only partially used and spend many hours of each day idle. By sharing the resources over a wider pool of end users there is less power consumed by idle servers.
• Data Centre Efficiency: Innovation in data centre design to achieve improved cooling and power conditioning, which ensures reduced consumption.

Clearly, this is compelling advice that indicates that we will not only be accessing a more stable server environment and gaining productivity from cloud-based applications, we will also be improving the longevity of our delicate planet. So, in my opinion, the clouds are looking very green.

Of course, do explore your options and ensure that the cloud solutions you are considering for adoption in 2011 are the best applications for your business and not just a greener choice for IT. But, do make a New Year's resolution to have great IT systems for your business in 2011, as Australia needs to make 2011 the year of working more productively.

All the best for your festive season and a happy New Year, and do let me know if you have any great IT questions for 2011.

David Markus is the founder of Combo - the IT services company that ensures IT is never an impediment to growth.

How do we reduce the amount of time our systems are down?

In the past when I've been asked this question I've talked about getting the investment in infrastructure right, and having an accountable support structure in place to ensure time is spent on proactive management instead of constant fire fighting.

I'm now starting to talk about investing in redundant internet connections to ensure an ongoing connection to cloud based solutions (either public clouds or private clouds in stable server farm environments).

So, what are public clouds and private clouds and how do you know what to use when? And, no, there aren't any cows wandering around in server farms! It's just another term for your set of servers in a data centre.

I like to think of public cloud as utility computing. Instead of running your own generator to produce electricity, you connect your home and office to the power grid. So, essentially, public cloud refers to a large scale server solution offered to a large number of people where you get a slice of a system or application you require. Examples of this are Yahoo EC3 offering virtual server space, or Google-Apps and Microsoft Office365 offering online applications to one and all. There are already hundreds, if not thousands, of examples of this sort of offering in the marketplace and the offerings are growing every day from CRM applications to accounting solutions.

Another huge benefit of public cloud solutions is that they look after the backup and DR, so you remove this often overlooked overhead from your list of IT issues. Of course, if you have a loss of connection at the office you also have the option of using a mobile device to make direct access to your cloud based solution giving you even more redundancy.

On the other hand, private cloud is where a company places its own servers into a data centre and makes them available to a controlled list of internal staff or clients for their own applications and storage solutions. There are many forms of this out there as well.

It is not yet entirely clear when to use public cloud and when to go private. Each requirement needs to be looked at and options considered for quality, security, robustness and total cost.

There are issues with security including where data resides and who has access to it at a government level. Certainly for politically sensitive information public cloud is a big no. For the SME sector where your leaked data is unlikely to make it to WikiLeaks, the issue may be more about the access controls and the quality of the security systems that stops your competitors and other hackers accessing your information stored online.

Other issues around quality of the infrastructure used, and time delays accessing information stored on servers too far from you (such as in America), also need to be understood before your selections are made.

Now is definitely a good time to be researching cloud based solutions, keeping in mind how stable and secure they are, and how they can reduce down time in your business. Solutions like Office365 by Microsoft and Telstra are claiming they will offer 99.9% uptime so less than 45 minutes a month of down time or less than nine hours a year. There are many other public cloud offerings that offer the same or better. Private cloud solutions will be dependent on the quality of the data centre you select and the robustness of the infrastructure installed.

As with other complex technology decisions, seek advice from a good advisor to reduce your research effort and ensure sound strategic decisions are made to minimise wasting of resources, time and effort and to ensure IT is enabling your growth.

David Markus is the founder of Combo - the IT services company that ensures IT is never an impediment to growth.

What do we need to do to our IT environment to appease banks and external investors?

There is little – if any – demand placed on small businesses to comply with standards for IT. However, as you grow and seek funding, it becomes very important to have good productivity systems embedded in your technology. It is then important to ensure the continuity and security of your business systems and IP are well looked after.

Why do the world's largest companies spend so much money on ensuring their IT systems are robust and recoverable? It is, of course, to ensure that they don't suffer embarrassing disturbances as we are seeing this week at the NAB. Even a delay in standard processes is frowned upon by government agencies and other organisations. My observation is that this is becoming more of an issue in the small and medium business sector today, but is not being addressed well enough yet.

The example I observed this week is of a logistics company that once received orders by phone, fax and email, converted those to paper requests or radio verbal requests and passed them to the drivers. Twelve months ago, they gave the drivers handheld devices and ticketing became automated from the client straight through to the driver. Sounds great, but if the system fails the drivers stop instantly for lack of instructions.

Clearly this business needs to review its system recovery in light of the new application in place, but it came as no surprise to me that they hadn't done this.

Over the past three years, IT systems have become more embedded in our day-to-day processes than ever before. However, the IT advisors have not really kept up with the need for fail over and disaster recovery systems and planning.

So let's look at how this happens...

1) Request from business unit for improved software system.
2) Software firm advises on project.
3) Budget is assigned for development and set up (hardware is typically out of scope).
4) Hardware is required but is seen as a threat to software budget which is already stretched.
5) Minimal hardware is purchased.
6) System goes live.
7) Problems are ironed out.
8) Celebration begins.

By now the business has spent more than it ever envisaged on the implementation and is heartily sick of change in the IT area. No one dares to bring up the old thorn of redundancy, backup or recovery and so the system runs unchecked until performance issues (with the under-specified equipment) or a disaster occurs. This is the point where we typically get called in to fix it!

Of course, there are savvy businesses out there that plan for the full cost of a system's implementation, but rarely will the consultants tell the whole truth for fear of losing the job before it starts.

As the business owner or manager you need to be aware of the pitfalls of the industry where each party in the implementation space wants to get the premium share of the project budget and will actively deny the cost of other components of the project.

So as you grow and invest in your business, an external eye from an investor or a bank may pull you up on these issues to ensure you are running a robust business. Your alternative to waiting for that embarrassing day is to prepare by having your system's performance, fail over and recoverability audited regularly by an independent body. As well as ensuring that all plans for upgrade include the system required to run as well as the systems required for a full recovery in a timely manner.

David Markus is the founder of Combo - the IT services company that ensures IT is never an impediment to growth.