Cloud Panel Discussion

Graycon Group, the industry leader in infrastructure solutions recently hosted a panel-led presentation to a cross section of Calgary business leaders on the topic of “cloud computing: its contentious issues!”

With an aim of providing an unbiased viewpoint, as well as an experienced perspective to the cloud, Graycon invited a company pursuing a cloud strategy, one that has decided to not pursue, and a cloud services provider.

On the panel we had Cory Fisk, the Director of IT, and Lead Solutions Architect for Calforex Currency Services; Clay Radu, the Manager, Information Systems at Crescent Point Energy; and Brian Fry the Chief Marketing Officer at RackForce, a cloud solution provider supporting over 1500 Customers ranging in size from SMB to Fortune 500.

The format involved the panellist’s views on the topic area, and an active audience Q&A.

The following is a brief summary of the event.

On the topic of “cost savings”   The conversation went from the marketing hype of big savings, to it was either too expensive or too hard to quantify. There was discussion around the idea that the savings would likely come from the business area it was supporting, like building a cost saving application faster or the agility gain within the business to react to market swings. IT savings are also a reality.

Cory Fisk, who was building a business case for a complete infrastructure upgrade said “We looked at one bill for just hardware, and we looked at the cloud and our connectivity. The cost savings with the cloud option were about 15-20%, although that wasn’t including redundancy. It was kind of an obvious choice for us”.

Clay Radu mentioned “One of the big things is the cost of connectivity. It depends on how much data is being streamed. We are an oil and gas firm and have large amounts of seismic data, geo data and engineering data. If it’s streaming over the web it has to be fast and reliable – but you’re paying for that cost”.

Brian Fry said “Rackforce worked with Microsoft to develop a licensing model and came up with the “service provider licensing agreement”. They buy on demand and bill out on a monthly basis as you need it instead of going through the huge cost of an on premise product. Big savings on licensing with will soon be the norm going forward”.

While the cloud is certainly a hot topic, and perhaps still a mystery, Brian put it into perspective with “Essentially, the cloud is a utility. If you look at the history of the power integration industry, it started off with everyone had to have the water wheel onsite for a manufacturing plant. Eventually, they figured out that you could put it in one place, and purchase only what you need!” and  “With all those data centres running at 10 to 40% efficiency you start to do the math; there really is savings there for everybody that contributes”.

Cory completed the discussion with “We could open several branches a month if we wanted to including expanding into the US. We’re in the process of real growth and don’t want to be held back by the size of the server room which would have had to have been re-built”.

Audience Questions ranged from the cost models for hybrid solutions to integrating cloud and non-cloud applications.  The Rackforce model suggests that working closely with a qualified IT consulting firm would help decide what should and shouldn’t move to the cloud, as well as line up the proper connections and security. Everyone agreed that office hardware would become less expensive over time and that a mix of portable and traditional-like monitors and keyboards would still be a requirement.

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On the topic of “security and privacy”   Although different, these two topics tend to be grouped together. Security is loosely defined here as the safety of your data from loss, while privacy is the non-disclosure of personal information.

Cory: “We deal with cash but much of our business is digital. We have banking and financial regulations that we have to adhere to. I think 5 years ago it I would have been a lot less appealing to put our information on the cloud. Now, putting it in our server room vs. putting it in the cloud makes no difference. In reality, hackers today have the potential of getting into virtually anywhere. No one’s immune to security threats but we can expect that those who maintain the data are the best at what they do and thus can provide as good of a security framework as what we would provide internally”.

Brian: “Cloud companies will tend to have more security than most individual companies. Their business model depends on it; any issues could harm their reputation and limit business. Complete security strategies come from the vendors such as Graycon who take responsibility for security. The thing that can’t be forgotten is network security. That’s something we’re really big on. We would like to have a private network between the 2 points. Your company would have its own firewall around the public/private cloud”.

Clay: “Oil & Gas data is mostly public knowledge through ERCB, just not the confidential drills. As soon as you drill a well, it goes to the Board so the data is out there anyways. We talk about how secure we should make systems (ie industry best practices) and strive to lock down systems as well as possible, but at the end of the day, if hackers want to get in, they’ll find a way to get in”.

There was discussion around risk management in general terms. One has to evaluate the level of risk your company is willing to take and choose the best alternative. You can always spend more, but is it needed? Most individual organizations cannot or do not spend the amount on security that a data center or cloud specialist does.

Cory: “We wouldn’t have gone this route if we didn’t feel it could meet all of our security and privacy requirements”.

Audience Questions were around the US Patriot Act, and general access to data in cross boarder circumstances. Brian, from Rackforce said that a fair bit of their growth since 2001 has been due to the US patriot act, mostly from Europe and Asia. “We’ve had to deal with the FBI directly, they came to us specifically for data in our data centre and we direct them to the RCMP. It never makes it all the way through the process. The Canadian privacy laws are outstanding!”

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On the topic of “Performance”   Does performance suffer when all or part of the infrastructure (accessing large amounts of data or large files) is in the cloud?

Cory: “Because we did an upgrade of our network at the same time we moved to the cloud, there was a significant performance increase. So it’s hard for me to say if it’s mostly because we now have fibre to the cloud servers, or if it’s because it’s just that much faster – I could say it’s a bit of both”.

Clay: “My concern is when you talk about bandwidth how do we get the needed connectivity and performance out of those devices. We still don’t see it from our head office, it’s just not fast enough and it’s a constant battle which we don’t have control”.

Brian: Let’s look conceptually, so what happens if you have these racks of servers. A large number of customers can be run on these servers. What happens is it’s a virtual CPU, its somewhere in that cloud. The reality is that there’s something always going on or failing. Because of the types of the things we are running, we are watching everything. We are aware of it before the customer even knows there’s a problem.

Cory: We’ve had users complain when using certain types of applications tied back to a certain one of our virtual services. It was nice to be able to put in an order one night and the next morning we have the extra memory we need with happier users. I did not have to worry about whose going to buy  the RAM or if it was available; it was done and taken care of.

When asked if there would be more performance issues with a hybrid solution, Brian responded with “The trick is for the developers to try and make sure the data is not flowing back and forth. What you want to see now is your display from the cloud – only. You have all these virtual CPUs, memory, & storage capacity, it all happens inside the cloud and the results are phenomenal.

An Audience Question involved how is performance measured and reported on?

Brian discussed the Service Level Agreement (SLA), and the measures that can be established depending on the level of service required.

Cory: “We started with a few programs and only a few users and it worked great, so when we went live with everything, it was not foreign. When there was an issue, it was solved overnight. It was a set price for a gig of ram, it was pretty straight forward to fix”.

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On the topic of “Support” How does it work, and is it better/worse?

Brian: “What we see is a key eco-system out there where there is a cloud service provider and solutions provider (like Graycon. Often the solutions provider will support the end users requirements because it could be an application issue or something that’s outside of what we’re capable of supporting. We don’t know all the applications they’re running”.

Cory: We weren’t going to go with a cloud solution provider that was going to do everything for us. Graycon has had to walk over a couple blocks to our office and needed physical access on several occasions. If you were going to do everything for us, we would be missing that last piece. There was a few times in the last 7 months that I was grateful to give keys to someone. Our trading floor opens up at 6:30am and that’s a drive I don’t have to make.

The big take-aways…

1. Replacing an existing infrastructure for the cloud is not likely cost efficient, although certain ‘trigger-points’ like an infrastructure or software overhaul can be!
2. ROI may not occur solely in the IT department, but business benefits may contribute considerably
3. Security can be more efficient in the cloud due to the larger investment, and a secure private network (VPN?), and managed on-premises security can address all concerns
4. A solid support partner is required to augment the services of cloud providers and fill in
5. We need another panel discussion!