The evolution of cloud in the enterprise [Q&A]

Over the past few years the cloud has significantly changed the way all of us store data, and in many cases how we run software too.

But from an enterprise perspective what impact has the cloud had on traditional data centers, and how is it continuing to evolve? We spoke to Saviz Izadpanah, chief technology officer of HighQ -- which provides cloud collaboration and content publishing services to the world's leading law firms, corporate legal teams and banks -- to find out.

BN: What has been the biggest impact of the cloud on enterprises?

SI: It has meant that a large amount of enterprise technology has moved outside of the traditional in-house IT department to cloud providers, either via Infrastructure-as-a-Service or Software-as-a-Service.

Moving to the cloud has a wide range of benefits for enterprises: it's more cost effective as companies need fewer in-house infrastructure administrators, and they can outsource system support and maintenance. Systems are often more reliable, as cloud providers must adhere to strict service level agreements with clients.

Quick, cost effective scalability is also a huge benefit and has made a massive difference to enterprises using the cloud. It's much quicker for cloud providers to add 50 virtual machines at the flick of a switch than for an in-house IT team to add physical servers.

BN: What are the major roadblocks to cloud adoption?

SI: Data security is a concern for some enterprises. There can be a lack of trust in third-party cloud providers' security infrastructure, and some firms feel more comfortable when their data is hosted on premise as they feel the security is in their control.

This is not necessarily the case, however, as cloud providers are often much better equipped to deal with data security as they have to adhere to strict regulations in order to provide hosting for their clients.

Another roadblock comes from the constantly changing rules around data sovereignty. Unless a cloud provider has hosting locations in the relevant jurisdictions, it's difficult to sell to industries that don't have that flexibility.

Extreme risk averse industries like law and finance require their data to be stored in certain jurisdictions, which cannot always be guaranteed by certain cloud providers.

BN: Many people think of cloud as being the end of the data center, but isn’t true that it’s data centers that make the cloud possible?

SI: Yes absolutely, any cloud service has to be hosted in a data center. Data centers will never die, they'll keep growing. IaaS and SaaS companies will need to keep using data centers, but the only change could be who owns those centers.

As Amazon, Microsoft and Google are beginning to build their own data centers, users that traditionally use independent data centers might go to these mega-providers instead in the future.

Fast forwarding a decade ahead, as more enterprises trust the cloud and don't want to have control of hardware or security, I can see the only data centers being owned by Amazon, Microsoft and Google.

It won't necessarily mean the end for smaller data center providers though, as they have begun to diversify into offering IaaS services too.

BN: Isn't the scalability of the cloud just an invitation to store more data, much of which may never be used?

SI: Yes -- but only if this data isn't used. With the introduction of big data there is huge potential for vast amounts of insight and business intelligence to be gleaned from these enormous volumes of data we have available.

For instance, at HighQ we use a service called Splunk where we store our log data (no client data); terabytes of it. Using this we can analyze to see how our platform is used, which is helpful to our product roadmap team in planning out new releases.

We can analyze performance data to see if there are any performance issues that we need to address. We can see historical data too to see what's changed over time.

BN: Do some companies see the cloud as an opportunity to offload responsibility for things like security and penetration testing?

SI: Yes they do. This is a genuine benefit of the cloud, as long as the company you've offloaded to can show they've performed the right level of security and penetration tests.

BN: Will we see security and privacy concerns leading enterprises towards more private clouds?

SI: This remains to be seen. It depends on whether there are any more high profile breaches of the public cloud, in which case we might see more enterprises moving to private cloud or even on premise.

On the other hand, if we see private cloud breaches, enterprises might decide that public cloud is more secure. It's impossible to predict.

BN: Where will the next phase of cloud growth come from?

SI: Cloud provided security services are on the up. As companies start to use big data solutions more aggressively and build their trust in cloud provided services, the usage of cloud security services is going to increase.

One growth area in particular could be DDOS scrubbing services. These services check all data going to your data center via their cloud services and gets cleaned in case of hackers or DOS attacks.

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