Cloud Promises and Truth

1.
Promise: Scalability
Truth: Absolutely (Think of Salesforce, EC2, Azure, AppEngine, etc)
2.
Promise: Peak Load Capacity on the fly
Truth: Think of Wimbledon, famous case study of Washington and EC2
3.
Promise: Zero Capex
Truth: Reduced not Zero (Think of appliance needed, integration required, and one time fee)
4.
Promise: Lower Beta and Testing cost
Truth: Yet to prove it
5.
Promise: Geographic Independence
Truth: Depends upon cloud provider. But remember of compliance challenges
6.
Promise: Device and Operating System and Technology platform independence
Truth: Depends upon genre of Cloud ( SaaS, PaaS or IaaS). Consider licensing issues.
7.
Promise: Multi tenancy enhances the utilization
Truth: Theoretically, Yes but Still to prove
8.
Promise: Centralization reduces cost
Truth: Theoretically, Yes but Still to prove
9.
Promise: Consistent Performance
Truth: Mostly. Consider network latency, bandwidth, 8 fallacies of distributed computing (http://blogs.sun.com/jag/resource/Fallacies.html)
10.
Promise: Enhanced Reliability
Truth: Questionable (jus remember EC2, AppEngine, and Salesforce outage)
11.
Promise: Cloud Computing Removes the Need for an Internal IT Department
Truth: Lie
12.
Promise: Applications Can Be Moved without Change to the Cloud
Truth: Not possible as of today
13.
Promise: It Is Easy to Switch Cloud Computing Vendors
Truth: Not possible as of today
14.
Promise: Moving to Cloud Computing Just Requires a Credit Card—It’s Computing as a Utility
Truth: Lie. Think of integration, training and other stuff