One of the hottest IT trends promoted by vendors such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft is cloud computing. Cloud computing is the delivery of computing as a service rather than a product,whereby by shared services, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices as a utility(like a electricity grid) over a network (typically the Internet). These IT companies are advertising the cloud without necessarily understanding the risks involved in this.
In November 2010, the movie studio Lionsgate announced it was planning to move SAP into Amazon Web Services cloud as it involves cost effectiveness over building its own data centres. However, in June 2010, Lionsgate CIO Leo Collins mentioned that only the SAP sandbox and email are in the Amazon cloud. This is confirmed by the 2011 SEC 10k fillings of Lionsgate. In the 10k fillings, Lionsgate auditing firm Ernst and Young mentioned no changes in internal control over financial clouding.
The cloud still has reliability issues to overcome before companies adopt it. There are three types of clouds: public, private and hybrid clouds. Amazon Web Services dis a experiment, causing servers to write multiple backups and crash. The crash took thousands of web pages, including federal government web site and it took Amazon more than a day to figure out what went wrong and 11 hours of data was lost.
Cloud computing needs to be more maturity before using in AIS. In Dec 2011, a survey was done by Corenet Global and Newmark Knight Frank indicating that 50% of the companies are still investing in their own centers. SAP also bought the SaaS Cloud Company SuccesFactors last December for $3.4 billion.
