The debate continues as to what cloud computing has to offer large businesses at this stage of its evolution. The Cloud or Fog? report was aimed at finding out what CIOs and CFOs are prioritising in terms of IT investment in the next few years and the fact that 67% are not looking to invest in cloud computing in the next two years is no real surprise (to us at least). As you say, there remains a lot of confusion and uncertainty around the term itself, and rather than undermining the results, I think this points to what we all know already – that too many products and services are being marketed as cloud computing and unfortunately it’s become a technical sell rather than a business and operational discussion, which is where the true value lies.

Our report did reveal that 60% of CIOs and CFOs at UK enterprises are more inclined to invest in software and services delivered online as a result of the recession and that the vast majority are looking for more flexibility in their software licensing agreements and want to avoid long term IT contracts. One could argue this can be delivered via a cloud model, but as enterprises remain uncertain of the security, reliability and maturity of cloud computing it appears alternative options are required.

Alex Atkin’s comments on private cloud are very relevant here and I would say are representative of many people: private clouds delivered by managed hosting organisations offers flexible use and dynamic provisioning of computing resource. The provision of an SLA can (despite Alex’s concerns) provide peace of mind for reliability and security of business critical IT services. The type of solutions provided by the top managed hosting providers are not comparable to shared web or public cloud services such as EC2 though. The demand for the capex vs. opex benefits (or even more effective use of opex) offered through online delivery of software and services remains a consideration and as the hosted private cloud model ticks all the boxes for the concerns outlined by CIOs and CFOs it can be an attractive option for mid-size and enterprise businesses.

You can’t beat in-house, familiar with the specific implementation, IT support.

Granted, that is changing. As with cloud computing its less and less about specific implementations and more about keeping the basic infrastructure, which all implementations are designed to run on, working. It will still to some expect be down to individual companies to deal with their specific implementation issues but its a lot less about the hardware you are running it on today.

I for one though do not relish the day when I trust all my e-mail on a third-party. I long since stopped using webmail for that reason as I would much rather keep my e-mail storage under my own control, where I can easily back it up if I want or transfer it to another PC easily.

Again that may be changing, I do not know if such as GMail let you backup your inbox/filters/etc as I do not use it, but the way things are evolving I can see it being perfectly plausable as they want to pull everyone over to cloud computing and knowing where your backups are is one of the biggest hurdles of trusting someone elses servers. Security of that information of course being the biggest. I mean, are Google reading my e-mail?

Of course for e-mail its relatively mute. While a lot of servers talk SSL these days it by no means guarantees that you e-mail has reached you without anyone reading it on its way. But then, neither does traditional post or the telephone which people tend to feel is more secure but in reality is not.

For me personally, I like the security of having a traditional web host for my sites and e-mail. I can easily move all my data to a different host if they go out of business or get too expensive/unreliable. I am unsure how this works with cloud computing though.

However open standards based it may get, I cannot visualise how it works and it makes me concerned that relying on a specific provider locks me into that provider. Running your own private cloud (which is basically just your own server farm, what most companies have had for years but a new name for it) you know where your data is which is very reassuring.