Just as this issue was going to press, Microsoft chose to unveil the Azure Services Platform at its Professional Developers Conference 2008 in Lost Angeles. By doing so it joins Google, Amazon, Salesforce.com and others in the nascent market for ‘cloud computing’.
Cloud computing is undoubtedly the future, if only because the idea of sitting in front of any computer anywhere in the world and having immediate access to your personal data makes intuitive sense. But, like so many ideas in the computing world, ‘cloud computing’ is a new label for something rather older. Anyone who hosts their Web site externally is using ‘the cloud’, as is anyone who banks on the Internet. However we do need to understand that such services do, on occasion, fail.
The implications of this were demonstrated with some force earlier this year during the collapse of Northern Rock. I was amongst the many customers who had availed themselves of the high interest rates offered by the building society’s Internet-only savings accounts. When disaster struck, the Northern Rock Web servers were so overwhelmed by visitors that they were unable to service requests, so cutting thousands of savers off from their savings for several days. Thankfully my local branch was prepared to do business with me face-to-face. Others which were less helpful, insisting this was an ‘Internet-only’ service, experienced the full wrath of their understandably frantic customers.
 Of course every business is out-sourcing all the time. We all need electricity, for example, to keep our lights on and our computers running, but very few organisations actually generate their own electrical power.Instead we rely on external suppliers. These suppliers do not guarantee a level of service, and are unlikely to compensate you for any financial loss incurred as a result of an interruption, but the maturity of the technology and stiff competition ensures that interruptions of more than a few seconds are very rare (at least in urban areas). Nevertheless, most companies find it prudent to invest in uninterruptable power supplies while the mission critical (hospitals and the like) have their own emergency generators.
Cloud computing seems to be adopting a similar business model. A quick survey of the service level agreements of companies offering Microsoft Exchange hosting, for example, reveals typical refunds of only a proportion of the monthly fee if availability falls below 90 per cent - in other words no access to email, calendars, address books, task lists and public folders for three solid days. However there is a problem here. When it comes to electricity, we out-source because the alternative - running our own generators - is prohibitively expensive. But when you’re out-sourcing Microsoft Exchange the only backup is to run an Exchange server in house, and if you’re doing that anyway, is it still worth out-sourcing?