Are you a cloudy sceptic?

Is the time for scepticism over cloud computing drawing to a close? As someone who rails against whatever is hailed as the latest and greatest, and refuses to believe uncritically in the wisdom of crowds, the hoopla around the cloud has oft given me pause for thought.

I can see the business logic of moving to a more centralised model of IT, I can see the drivers behind getting out of anything that isn't your core business and instead buying in services as and when you need them, and I understand how virtualisation is a key enabler that allows all this consolidation to take place.

What's always struck me though is that a couple of questions remain unanswered. First, few people seem to be asking where the connectivity is coming from, and whether it's adequate to the job. Application services rely on a high-speed totally reliable network, without which the organisation that's switched over to an application service provider cannot function. It's a big ask.

Yet small to medium-sized businesses, who are among the main target markets for a range of service providers, connect in the main using slow, flaky ADSL. And if they're not, they're using some form of expensive and -- again -- fairly slow leased line.

Never mind what the hype merchants tell you, this is what's happening on the ground (or under it), rather than the whizzy carrier (or metro) Ethernet that grabs the headlines. Yes, Ethernet services are coming, and yes, they're highly desirable in all sorts of ways, but they're not yet available across large areas of the country, especially outside highly concentrated urban areas.

For an enterprise with a private cloud or a service provider, or anyone in between this is a bit of a problem but one that will be resolved -- one hopes -- over time as long-distance Ethernet spreads.

The second question is how a cloud owner is going to manage all the stuff that the model entails. A cloud to a small to medium-sized business is a set of services at the end of the wire. But if you're the provider, you need a lot of kit and it all needs managing -- this is the big headache, especially given the way that virtual machines can move around inside a datacentre.

If you've the luxury of starting with a blank slate, you can stuff the datacentre with gear from the same manufacturer and manage it all from the same plane of glass -- in theory. If, like most facilities, your gear has been acquired over the years from a dozen different vendors for a variety of reasons that made sense at the time, then it's a different story. Management then becomes a pretty big headache that can take a lot of expensive people's time to keep running. It's a big brake on the uptake of cloud computing.

I started to wonder about all this when presented with not one but two sets of cloud management systems, both of which are promising much the same thing.

One was Abiquo's eponymous offering, the other was Cloud.com's CloudStack 2.0. Both promise to manage all vendors' equipment seamlessly, adding a layer of abstraction over the top of the systems, whether or not those systems exist in your facility or someone else's.

They both clearly have high ambitions but, if they work -- and I'm seeing a demo of Abiquo's Enterprise Edition next week -- then they could be a catalyst for a jump in cloud take-up -- and a lowering of cloud sceptics' blood pressure.