Cloud and the Utility Meter Analogy

The "home utility" analogy is often used to explain Cloud Computing. For example, most people do not have an electricity generator in their house, and even if they do, they do not run it all the time. Instead, they rely on an external provider for electricity.

In fact, I have often heard this analogy used by Cloud providers themselves: when asked "Why should I use your hosted services?", they ask back "Do you run an electricity generator in your house?".

We seem to take for granted that our utility providers quality of service is a given. I for one live in a rural village which often has outages of electricity and telephony due to... we'll I'm not entirely sure and to find out would be a time consuming task I hazzard a guess.

Now, applying this to Cloud based applications and services points the finger directly at the connectivity provider. More often that not, the underlying provider is BT and we all know (like em or hate em) their network is improving constantly and 21CN should overcome the vast majority of the SLA issues we currently face.

So, in conclusion, putting your business critical applications and service in the Cloud is not a 'leap of faith'. Today, for small and medium sized businesses, it's a simple case of economics and simplicity. Don't hold back on investigating your options, you never know, what the Cloud promises may just be true!

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