To “Cloud” or not to “Cloud”?

by Graham Jessiman (Indiana Department of Homeland Security)

In my 40+ years in the IT industry, many buzzwords and strategies have passed my ears (some even stuck on the way through): Mainframe, devolved processing, clustered processing, high availability, thin client, fat client, client/server...

The list goes on and on and on.

The latest to add to the list is “Cloud Computing.”

In a nutshell, Cloud Computing is a similar concept to the old timeshare systems where you could “buy time” on someone else’s computer to run things like payroll and accounting functions. The difference now is that you don’t necessarily know that the application you are accessing is running on a machine (or bank of machines) outside your premises.

There are cost savings to be made in that the necessity to employ IT staff to maintain the servers, network, etc. is devolved to the cloud provider, and thus this cost can be shared between many customers.

Another benefit is the ability to add more processing power or data storage almost at will for a known upcharge.
There are also different types of cloud:

• Public cloud
• Private cloud
• Hybrid cloud

An example of a public cloud would be ESRi’s ArcGIS Online which makes a wealth of location based data available for consumption by interested parties.
A private cloud would have a customer’s data “fenced off” from everyone else, or it could even be a cloud-type environment running on their own infrastructure.

Hybrid clouds can take a number of forms:

• A legacy application front end hooked to a cloud-based back end server
• The same application running on two separate clouds for disaster resiliency, with transactions applied concurrently to both
• A cloud based “hot” backup to an on-premise system, where the transactions are applied to the cloud system concurrently with the local system

When a disaster occurs, each of these scenarios have their pros and cons, and decisions on whether or not to adopt a cloud, hybrid or local strategy should be made after your jurisdiction’s Continuity Of Operation (COOP) planning has been completed.

You should take account of all possible occurrences and narrow down the strategy (or strategies) which can keep you running in every possible situation.

Unfortunately, in this day and age, a pencil and paper solution is highly unlikely to cut the mustard.

I know I’ll get responses to this!