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Infrastructure and energy costs can be cut, but using server capacity of Amazon.com and other global IT heavyweights raises reliability and information security issues Curt Cherewayko Author Eckhardt Tolle’s website and online bookstore experienced an unprecedented spike in user traffic after his Oprah Winfrey Show appearance. If the Vancouver-based author had appeared on the show six months earlier, Redwerks Systems Inc., which powers Tolle’s website, might not have been able to handle the traffic surge. Fortunately, the Vancouver company had replaced its servers with Amazon.com Inc.’s simple storage service months earlier, allowing it to keep its servers in the “cloud” and scale up capacity as needed. Having flexible server capacity without the need for physical servers is among the benefits of cloud computing – a data-management model that has businesses debating the future role, and even the necessity, of their IT administration department.
As well, by outsourcing computing capacity to third-party services over the Internet, businesses can reduce energy costs and other infrastructure and personnel needs. When cloud computing has fully evolved, the world may be connected by one or a series of super computers that host all the hardware and software capacity required to connect the global network. Because Redwerks’ platform is browser-based and powered by servers in one of Amazon’s many data centres, its clients don’t need to worry about the nuts and bolts of running their website. And Redwerks, whose platform is used by design professionals and IT staff to create and manage applications and websites, no longer has to predict how much server capacity will be required for each customer. Redwerks CEO Gregory Thomas-Tench said that when Tolle’s website was hit with the Oprah-related surge in traffic, the company was able to instantaneously increase server capacity and then reduce it when traffic returned to normal levels. Overestimating a website’s web traffic can lead to unnecessary costs from owning too many servers; underestimating it can result in website crashes and lost business. Although cloud computing has existed for a number of years, Microsoft Corp., Google and other IT heavyweights only recently began applying the label to their services. Adam Killam, an Internet marketing consultant, noted that that Salesforce.com Inc. – a company that delivers a customer management service over the Internet and whose name is synonymous with cloud computing – was founded in 1999. At that time, only larger companies had the connectivity required for cloud computing. “Now the everyday mom-and-pop shop … can use an application that’s being used by some of the biggest businesses in the world,” said Killam, founder of the Vancouver Salesforce.com User Group. “You pay your $65 a month or whatever it is … and you get the same features and functionality that J.P. Morgan has.” However, the 250 subscribers of Vancouver-based web-content manager Marqui Inc. were given a scare last June when the company went into receivership. Marqui had to react quickly to quell the fears of subscribers concerned that their content would be lost. Phil Calvin, CTO of Sitemasher Corp., a Vancouver startup offering a cloud platform for developing websites, said the company’s platform allows customers to easily export all their content to another cloud platform. And by renting server space in separate cities – Los Angeles and Vancouver – the company ensures that customer websites will not be interrupted if one system goes down. Another issue is security: who has access to all that information as it travels over the Internet between the vendor’s servers and the customer? Vancouver’s Layer 7 Technologies Inc. describes itself as the gatekeeper of information in the cloud. Its sales grew 600% in 2007 and 100% in 2008 to just below $10 million, as the cloud-computing model was widely embraced. The company uses firewalls, encryption and other standards-based security mechanisms to ensure that data can be transferred from one application or platform to another without being exposed to viruses, hackers and other security breaches. “If [businesses] are going to put mission-critical information on the Internet, we give them the comfort and confidence that it’s being protected – that the right people are getting information and the wrong people aren’t,” said Ed Koepfler, Layer 7’s president and CEO. Koepfler noted that there are always security risks to doing business over the Internet, but he added that Layer 7’s security systems have never been breached. Businesses that aren’t Internet-based are also adopting the cloud model. Klondike Contracting Corp., a Vancouver-based general contractor, started using Salesforce.com two months ago. As the company grew, its previous content management software, which resided on Klondike’s network, couldn’t handle complex data synchronization. That resulted in discrepancies in shared documents on the network. Klondike’s president, Eric Schapira, said the company’s spreadsheets and other shared documents now interact seamlessly with each other and are automatically synchronized daily. It cost Klondike roughly $4,000 to set up the new content management system. It also pays roughly $450 per month in subscription fees, but Schapira said that in the long run the system will save the company money, and Klondike won’t have any more scalability concerns as it grows. •
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Business in Vancouver March 17-23, 2009; issue 1012 |
