Hovering clouds in IT today
The recent recession has forced companies to revaluate their IT strategies with the focus being on cutting costs on non-core areas. Lucky are those companies whose portfolios have been able to respond to the crisis. The need to reduce IT spend is of utmost importance today and that has fuelled the need for companies to look for alternative delivery models to respond to those needs - resulting in a business environment which seems ideal to favor the growth of the cloud computing model.
The SOA philosophy coupled with the emergence of Virtualization technologies and ever increasing and reliable Internet bandwidth have provided an environment which has nurtured the concept of cloud computing. Newer and newer technological innovations in the application development space have usually been nurtured in environments which provided the necessary impetus. But then, all that has been based on the need to reuse, reuse and reuse what someone else has created. With cloud computing, the concept of reuse has acquired an additional connotation of increased responsibility to the proportions not considered before. The stakes are high when services are being trusted to run a whole set of operations besides being trusted with data as in the case of a hosted CRM application for example.
What is important is that people are more interested in knowing what can be done with a product rather than understanding the technology behind implementing it. However, be sure to understand that the potential of promises offered on the cloud can be fulfilled only by technology and services innovation. Global delivery models are undergoing rapid changes and hence product and technologies also need to adapt. Conversely, backed by new products/technologies, global delivery models should adapt to offer newer and newer services. It is important to bring together technology capabilities (multi-tenancy, virtualization etc.) and service capabilities (metering, composite services, evolution of service catalog etc.)
Though there has been a clamor for adopting cloud computing and lots and lots of companies are being tempted to look at being either a cloud service provider or a cloud service user, not everything will become cloud computing because many projects will require a level of privacy or performance or uniqueness that cannot be supported yet through the cloud.
Companies that do take the plunge to adopt cloud computing base it on a definite strategy whereby they do not 'put all the eggs in the same basket'. The way to go today is to segregate non-core applications from core applications and then analyze the non-core applications that have the lowest risks in case of failure of servicing from the cloud. As companies gain confidence on moving parts of their enterprise to the cloud, they could trigger a similar migration of other applications to the cloud.
The industry is putting in a lot of energy to understanding the concept of cloud computing. Companies the world over are scrambling to think up new innovations and services that can be offered to consumers over the internet. As a result, commonly heard terms like SaaS, PaaS, IaaS have to contend with newer, innovative concepts and terminologies like Server as a Service, Workplace as a Service etc.
