Will You Reach The Clouds?

You can hardly read a newspaper or technical journal these days without hearing about “the cloud” and how it is upon us. So, what does all this really mean, what is the cloud and what does it mean for you. The cloud refers to the growing presence of hosted applications, storage, and processing capabilities. It provides you and I with a great set of choices on how to best manage both our internal IT, as well as providing another way to deliver our applications to our customers (be they internal or external customers).

Firstly, let’s demystify “the cloud.” The cloud really just refers to hosted resources. So it’s not a big jump to simply replace “hosted” for “cloud” and you have a more down to earth description. (no pun intended !). So, what we are talking about is really the move from applications and resources that are local to those that are hosted, either by someone else, or by your own company. Let’s look at a few examples. Perhaps the best know and most successful cloud company is Salesforce.com. They provide a customer relationship management (CRM) product that users access via a simple web browser. No software installed, nothing to maintain. This is a huge cost savings for customers, and allows them to focus their resources on their core business. Another example would be Amazon’s “Elastic Cloud Compute (ECC).” Amazon provides users with access to hosted platforms, including disk space, operating system of choice, IP addresses and more, all charged by the hour. And you can dynamically increase or decrease resources as you need them, also by the hour. This gives you amazingly new control over your IT spend, and you are freed from all of the administrative tasks of managing this infrastructure.

There are a variety of initiatives underway from several of the major market players including Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Symantec, with Oracle set to unveil their offering shortly.

What does this have to do with you? Maybe something, maybe nothing. Some questions your company should ponder are the following:

1. Is our internal IT basically a commodity. We use standard technology and IT administers it?
2. Do we expect our IT resource needs (computers, operating systems, disk storage) to be changing over the next 24 months (either up or down)?
3. Would our customers benefit from an option to use our application over a simple web browner rather than having to buy and install clients?

If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, it is well worth looking into offerings by some of the companies mentioned above. If you answered “no” to all of these questions, you should still pay attention to the developing cloud. Why, because it is the new model of computing that is being embraced worldwide. You may not see it everywhere today, bit the infrastructure is being built out as fast as physically possible, and it is no longer a question of “if,” but “when.”

For those of us who remember the mainframe days, you may be struck by déjà vu, when you realize we have gone from centrally hosted computing severing dumb terminals, all the way back to essentially the same model. However, it is clear that what makes this go-round quite different is dramatically lower cost and faster hardware and networks, and large variety of high quality applications. The lack of these led to the initial demise of the mainframe as the predominant computing platform.

So, sit back, relax and enjoy your flight! Our trip into the cloud will be a very exciting and rewarding journey.

[photo credit: SXC]

Comments

[Felicia Sams]

We are interested to increase traffic to your website, please get back to us in order to discuss the possibility in further detail.