Cloud Computing: A Fast Ticket to Data Silo Sprawl (DSS)?

A recent survey from ScienceLogic found that a majority of IT executives expect that cloud computing will reduce the number of their company data silos.  Only 17 percent worried that cloud computing will actually increase the number of islands of isolated data repositories within their organization.  That may be wishful thinking.

With the current state of cloud computing, silo-ing information has never been easier.  Now in addition to silo-ed information residing in on-premise applications and repositories, the rapid setup, roll-out and provisioning of  cloud-based locations makes it even easier to create new silos of information — now residing external to the organization.  The low cost of cloud computing applications is actually complicating the problem because it allows and almost encourages line-of-business managers to by-pass their lumbering IT groups and get almost instant access to cloud-based applications.  The result is that some organizations are creating very complex patch-works of internal and external applications, and any attempt to unify data across the different repositories has become more difficult than ever before.

David Linthicum in an InfoWorld blog commented on the problem saying that “siloization counters any efficiencies gained through the use of better-virtualized and sharable infrastructure, as provided by public and private clouds. Indeed, in many instances the use of cloud computing actually makes things worse.”  Linthicum advocates strongly studing your data and processes before building out any new applications to avoid data silo sprawl (DSS) — good advice, but probably easier said than done.

A report from Appirio found that 75 percent of organizations rate cloud computing as a top priority, but only 4 percent of organizations with cloud-based application have actually tried to integrate cloud-based data.  Part of the problem is that many SaaS-based applications don’t offer good APIs or tools for data integration — something which is bound to improve going forward, but which is still clearly a weak point with cloud applications.

An InformationWeek survey found that while companies using cloud-based applications love the ease of deployment and use, most are challenged when trying to integrate or access the data created by the cloud applications.  Michael Biddick, author of the survey report, comments that “you’d think IT teams would have learned their lesson, given our sad history with siloed data sets and today’s identity management and user access requirements.”

The InformationWeek article outline side effects of cloud computing and data silo sprawl:

• SaaS/Cloud apps often lack integration with centralized identity management, making it difficult to consistently control access to data
• Reporting across multiple repositories is difficult, especially for compliance, often requiring the aggregation and reformatting of reports made with the different systems
• Business Analytics and Business Intelligence by definition requires a complete data set to analyze — siloed data works against this goal
• Integration with Business Process Management (BPM) in a similar way cannot easily flow between data siloed in multiple applications
• Siloed data makes security and governance more difficult