Lumison held a roundtable discussion last month, which gathered together journalists, IT managers and other industry experts to discuss the future for managed hosting in light of cloud computing’s growing popularity. There is a perception that the cloud is replacing managed ISP, and this reflects both an opportunity and a risk.

Certain applications hosted in the cloud – such as Facebook or MySpace – are used with comfort and confidence throughout the world, whether people know they’re using cloud computing or not.

The various levels of security were discussed, as well as the trust these types of sites have engendered. The conclusion was that the use of cloud-hosted applications and sites depends on the individual: you trust the platforms if you trust the brand. And therefore, as trust is built, cloud applications will become readily acceptable.

So is this restricted to personal data? On the contrary, the attendees moved on to discuss businesses’ use of the cloud – their reliance on CRM platforms like Salfesforce.com, for example. Similarly, cloud-based services like Google’s Gmail are now being adopted as standard in SMEs. The consensus was that people will no longer install an Exchange server, and put time and effort into something they can get for free.

It was suggested that cost will be one of the main issues driving the adoption of new cloud applications and solutions, especially in the public sector. With 2010 finance restrictions now in view, the cloud is now seen as a viable hosting solution. With a bigger appetite and understanding of the risk, many of Lumison’s public sector clients are looking towards the cloud with next year’s budget in mind.

Lumison CEO Aydin Kurt-Elli asked whether the business model for the cloud was sustainable, with regards to the pure elastic cloud service, with no contract term or longevity issues.
 
Andrew Jones, IT manager at Warburg Pincus, the private equity firm, asked how easy it would be to move from one cloud service to another. Any transfer will inevitably involve some cost, particularly when clusters of customers have applications that are ten years old, which would prove very difficult to migrate. It takes a critical event to change the mindset and permit change within an organisation, but while data migration may be difficult, it’s not impossible.

IT Pro journalist Jennifer Scott agreed and said the employers and CTOs of the future will embrace cloud computing. She repeated a quote that she had seen in the Guardian: “Every technology you’re born with is normal, anything developed before you are thirty is exciting, and anything developed after thirty isn’t worth it... Or it’s too complicated.”

The cloud is at the evangelical stage at the moment. Aydin Kurt-Elli commented that the success of the cloud depends on whether “a total business case can be made. Typically cloud solutions cannot answer questions about service level agreements at the moment.”

Grahame Davies, chairman for LINX, the London Internet Exchange, said that at the conception of the Internet, people were told it would replace neither the letter nor face-to-face meetings. “So what will the cloud replace?” he asked. “It’s impossible to guess, so we need to look for a point, that single moment when everything becomes hosted on the cloud.”

Grahame Davies summed this up: “If people don’t sign up to the cloud today, will they sign up tomorrow? And if they don’t, what needs take place to make this happen?”