One of the
key messages from cloud suppliers is the speed and automation of application upgrades. The dirge goes that customers who still have
Lucent’s red coffee stain logo on their phones really, really want upgrades if
only they weren’t so darn hard and costly. Enter the cloud to whisk away their
problems without IT lifting a finger.
And chaos
ensues.
If you use a
smartphone, you have an inkling of the problem.
Does a week pass without application update notices? No. What do you do?
Either lazily set yourself for auto-update or manually update when the screen notices
get too annoying. In the smartphone
world this is mostly OK because individual apps don’t really interact with each
other – Robot Unicorn Attack and Virtual Dentist don’t share data. The
exception being when there’s an operating system update. Some apps crash
because their developers didn’t build the connection in time. When this happens, users lose functionality until
it gets fixed.
Version
Control is Important for Business Continuity
Communications
applications already touch and share data with many applications from differing
vendors; a number that grows daily. What
happens when an application update breaks the data-sharing bridge? It stops working. Businesses using multi-tenant cloud services have
less control when it comes to updates. As the marketing spiel goes, it just
happens, automatically. If a business
has a home-grown application tied into a cloud service, they’re begging for a
major outage.
Those using
multi-instance applications, whether public or private cloud, have more control
as to when updates are rolled out. Their applications are essentially islands
offering complete control. Businesses need
to test ecosystem interoperability before releasing updates into the wild.
Uncontrolled
Mobility
Mobile
communications applications further increase the risk. If you want Cisco Jabber, WebEx or Avaya
Flare, you visit the Apple or Android stores, not the vendor or IT. If there’s an update, it comes from Apple,
not corporate IT. Cisco tried to deal
with this with Cius (RIP) by allowing customers to setup their own private app
store that was controlled by IT. Cisco could do that because it owned the
hardware, operating system and application portal. But with increasing numbers of users
providing their own personal device for business use, that control is largely gone.
Consider
this your canary in the cloud mine.
