Survey raises doubts about IaaS

Is Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) actually doing more damage to the reputation of cloud services than good? That this might be the case has emerged as the result of a recent survey undertaken on behalf of enterprise cloud infrastructure provider, iland.

The survey respondents report staggering failure rates across 'tech giant' IaaS implementations and identify the support and functionality issues where work is needed by IaaS providers to overcome the top challenges.

But it also seems to highlight a general misunderstanding amongst both cloud users and service providers – with the former obviously reacting to the marketing and sales blandishments of the latter – as to what cloud is really all about. Though many users (and more potential users) seem to consider IaaS as an important solution to their cloud delivery requirements.

The trouble is, IaaS does not answer the question `why’ users need, or even should want to provide cloud services or what results will represent good value to the business as a whole. IaaS just answers some parts of the question `how’ whatever cloud service gets specified is delivered.

The global survey, `Casualties of Cloud Wars: Customers are Paying the Price’, has been conducted for iland by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA). Its findings reveal that while tech giants fight cloud wars, customers are suffering from overwhelming cloud failure rates and multiple unexpected challenges.

The survey asked more than 400 professionals across the United States, Europe and Asia-Pacific to share their experiences with IaaS providers. The majority of respondents reported experiencing challenges and failures, though they continue to soldier on in the cloud.

IT is moving forward with cloud because without it, keeping pace with the innovation needed to remain competitive in most industries is nearly impossible.

“Stories about successful cloud implementations are captivating, but the reality is that cloud is more complex than many news headlines make it out to be,” said Dennis Drogseth, vice president, EMA. “Companies must be self-aware. Unless they have an experienced staff that can manipulate the mass-market systems of the big providers, they should seek cloud vendors that take a different, personalised approach.”

Respondents used an average of three cloud vendors, which is in practice likely to the common position for the majority of businesses. Yet this in interpreted in the survey as indicating an ongoing effort to find the `right’ cloud solution, risk mitigation policies that require the diversification of providers, department-level fragmentation, and no pressing need to standardise on a single vendor.

This could, however, be also interpreted as a fundamental misunderstanding of what cloud services as `service’ rather than as a technology solution is all about. It is highly unlikely that the services any business will require across the gamut of its operations will come from a single supplier.

What is important now is that different cloud service providers look to build collaborative interoperability into their offerings so that users can achieve their business objectives, not achieve an elegant technical solution.

In addition to commonly discussed cloud benefits like cost and rapid scalability, 49 percent of respondents view disaster recovery as a key advantage to hosting workloads in the public cloud.

Customers of VMware vCloud-based service providers report the highest success (67 percent) and lowest failure rates (33 percent), defined as stalled or unsuccessful (tried but failed) adoption.

Public cloud customers of Rackspace reported the highest failure rates (63 percent), followed by Amazon Web Services (57 percent) and Microsoft Azure (44 percent).

A significant 88 percent of respondents experienced at least one unexpected challenge, which does seem a rather low figure, in practice, and could be interpreted as a sign that cloud delivery is doing rather well considering we are still at the early stages of its existence. For any business to go through any project building process more complex than opening a can of beans and not face one unexpected challenge would be surprising.  

At the top of this list were pricing challenges stemming from complex pricing models and hidden fees that can rapidly counteract the cost-savings benefit of cloud. Performance issues, which can be experienced with some cloud platforms, were also concerning.

Based on the findings, it is clear those who have experimented with cloud have developed a keen understanding of where their teams need help and what capabilities are required to make cloud more accessible. Learning from their experiences, companies can avoid pitfalls by evaluating internal resources upfront—including technology, personnel, expertise and budget—and assessing how a cloud vendors’ services, support and functionality address specific needs.

Eighty percent of respondents reported that they required some amount of professional services to get started in the cloud in key areas like:  security/compliance (57 percent), integration with existing data centre services (47 percent) and disaster recovery planning (45 percent).

Better VMware vSphere integration was cited as a requirement by 45 percent of respondents. Lack of integration can vastly complicate management of both a VMware on-premise environment and a differing public cloud platform.

Forty-six percent noted the need for improved virtual machine scaling and resource scalability capabilities. Scalability, both of individual VMs and the entire cloud footprint, is core to the promise of cloud but far from straightforward in most clouds.

Fifty-two percent expressed the need for better management dashboards. Currently, many public cloud vendors do not provide visibility into detailed real-time and historical data on performance and billing, complicating the management of public clouds and associated budgets.

Finally, 98 percent agreed that high quality, highly available phone-based support is critical to their cloud implementations. Many public clouds offer separate, costly support contracts that both surprise customers and negatively impact cost reduction goals.

That does seem to suggest that many users are therefore not thinking about asking the right questions of service providers – and especially question about contract terms – before signing up. It could also suggest that more service providers need to set out the meet the standards needed to qualify for the Cloud Industry Forum’s Code of Practice, which covers issues such as contract terms pretty clearly.

APAC, EMEA and U.S. respondents agree (97 percent) that targeting workloads toward datacentres in specific regions for compliance and data sovereignty is important or very important. This, too, is offered at a premium with most clouds.

forty-three percent of respondents called for more transparent pricing, emphasising the challenge of inscrutable and multi-faceted cloud pricing models and the resulting bills.

“Every day, potential customers come to us with stories about their frustrating experiences with public cloud, and it’s that close interaction that fuels our commitment to create more positive outcomes,” said Dante Orsini, SVP at iland. “We commissioned this survey to get quantifiable insights into the global reality of companies’ challenges, successes and failures with cloud. Now, we are sharing these results to help inform others as they move to the cloud.”