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While the cloud computing market is in its infancy at the moment, if or when it does take off, organisations will find themselves with some significant challenges. A recent discussion with John Gillam, a Programme Director in BT's IT Services Team, provided insights into how BT is intending to help.

Key points:

• If cloud computing activity ramps up in the enterprise space, the number of services consumed and service provider relationships to be managed will proliferate very rapidly
• Assuring service levels to the business when systems become dependent on resources and functionality from many sources, both in house and external, will be a challenge
• Through an ambitious plan, exploiting SOA based monitoring and management capability, BT is readying a brokerage and management service to tackle some of the issues many suppliers are currently avoiding
• With the aim of providing end-to-end service level agreements, from third party back-end resources to the desktop, however, delivering on the promise won't be easy.

Lots of people are talking about cloud computing, and while we still have some issues with definitions in this space, there is no getting away from the fact that we will increasingly be presented with the option of consuming IT resources and/or application functionality as a service over time. As of today, however, with a few exceptions, mainstream businesses are doing little more than listening with interest and perhaps kicking the tyres in this space. The stage we are at now is very much the early market in which customers (or potential customers) are gaining experience, familiarity and, if appropriate, confidence to do more.

The next step, and Freeform Dynamics would hesitate to put a timescale on this, is towards more serious adoption of cloud technology and services in the mainstream. By this, we mean moving beyond experimental or exceptional use to exploitation of what's on offer to solve everyday needs. As organisations move into this stage, they will probably be focusing on specific, discrete requirements, with a relatively well bounded scope of activity that is easy to get their arms around from an implementation and operations perspective.

At some point, assuming that cloud offerings actually deliver on the promises we are hearing, we step over the line into the next stage, which is one of broader adoption across various operational domains and application areas. If organisations get to this point through ‘natural' organic growth in the use of cloud offerings without proper planning and process, they are likely to end up in a fragmented and risky mess. Why? Because coordinating operations, service levels, support and maintenance across in-house systems, many cloud services, and many service providers is going to be complex and challenging. In specific terms, there will be physical integration level dependencies, commercial and contract level dependencies, and the interesting question of who is responsible and accountable for what when things go wrong or need changing.

And this situation, which is essentially two steps on from where we are at the moment in terms of adoption activity, is what BT is preparing for as it thinks about the role it will play in relation to cloud. While still work in progress, BT is putting together an SOA based operational architecture that is designed to tackle many of the performance monitoring and management complexities that larger organisations are destined to face. This architecture will be used as the foundation for a hosted/managed service offering aimed primarily at controlling the way in which internal and external resources are mixed, often dynamically, to meet business requirements.