Category: Cloud computing
November 24th, 2009
The cloud computing battleground takes shape. Will it be winner-take-all?
You can bet that the industry will be playing for keeps yet businesses can increasingly reap real bottom line benefits. This year has been one of relatively grand alliances between emerging cloud computing vendors as they fill holes in their capabilities and try to create appealing one-stop enterprise cloud services.
We’ve seen major announcements so far from IBM and Juniper, Cisco/EMC/VMware, and most recently BMC and Salesforce. There are many other smaller initiatives that have formed as well and all of these efforts underscore several key points for those businesses trying to understand the real strategic benefits of the cloud including cost, agility, and scalability:
First, there is no single vendor that can today provide an end-to-end cloud computing solution for businesses, hence the reason for all the alliances. The cloud computing stack (facilities, bandwidth, compute power, storage, operations, management, etc.) is deep and comprises not only most of the elements that you would find in a corporate data center but a great deal more besides. This includes R&D, product development, support capabilities, developer networks, and capabilities such as compliance monitoring and additional layers of security and governance.
Second, it’s unclear how the cloud computing vendor landscape is going to shape up. Everyone is in early days yet with only Amazon with anything approaching operational maturity, with Google and Force.com vying for the lower end of the enterprise. Making long-term decisions isn’t a good idea in this environment, though using cloud computing tactically does make good sense at this point, especially if you’re experimenting with private cloud technology that will likely translate well to public clouds, such as Eucalyptus.
Third, and perhaps most importantly, standards for cloud computing are just emerging and only cover today an incomplete portion of the cloud computing stack. This means scenarios where you can seamlessly move your cloud computing workloads from your private cloud and public clouds of choice are fairly far off still, unless you are willing to commit to one of the alliances that will enable it with proprietary approaches. This is the core scenario that businesses are interested in as dabble with cloud technology internally today and then want to move outside to get cost and quality advantages as they get more confidence in the cloud. But it’s one that is currently rife with lock-in and those that remember the platform wars of the 90s are wise to recall.
Related: Cloud computing and the return of the platform wars
Let’s also not forget the economics of online services, which apply generally to any cloud computing service that is self-provisioning (meaning users can sign-up and begin using it immediately). Infoworld’s Zack Urlocker pointed out last week that Tim O’Reilly’s discussion of the tendency of the end-game scenario for a given online segment to be winner-takes-all almost certainly applies to cloud computing as well:
While the benefits of cloud computing are enormous in terms of reducing costs, increasing utilization, and providing scalability, there’s a significant risk of lock-in. Given the early state of cloud technology, there simply aren’t adequate standards to offset this.
My fellow ZDNet colleague Phil Wainewright recently pointed out what I like to call the
November 18th, 2009
Salesforce Chatter: Social operating systems emerge on the IT stage
The next big shift: Intranets, portals, and software suites that are the integrating force of the social fabric for our organizations. This morning’s announcement here at Dreamforce today from Salesforce of Chatter, an enterprise-class realization of Facebook and Twitter, is further evidence of the industry’s push for social Web capabilities for business activities.
Early indications are that Chatter will drive conversation and attention on this subject in enterprise circles very much like Google Wave did for consumer circles (as well as some businesses.)
Of course, a central question is — given current economic challenges for example — whether this is what the enterprise world is really looking for right now. However, as I’ve covered here throughout the year, enterprise social computing has been coming into its own as a significant component of modern business software for a number of reasons lately.
So while adoption numbers vary, it’s an increasingly smart bet that not only are social applications moving into the enterprise, but that existing business applications will begin to get more and more social features.
I often cite Reed’s Law as compelling evidence that social systems have a strong innate tendency to create more value that non-social systems. The message: Social business applications are just a more effective model in general for building business value. However announcements like Chatter begin to make this argument less important. That’s because it’s built right into the Salesforce platform and according to Sam Diaz “will be included in all paid editions of Salesforce CRM and Force.com.” In other words, the argument is essentially over when social computing becomes baked into the infrastructure of the enterprise.
This will allow the 135,000+ existing apps built on Force.com to have a unified social environment complete with security and one common social graph as well as consistent, shared collaboration features. This is a major step up from the traditional world of non-social business software, all the more so because it’s as much of an infrastructure play as an application play. A comparable response would be to make Microsoft Office more social or perhaps more accurately, the fundamental Google Apps infrastructure. It’s also arguable that the new Microsoft SharePoint 2010 is just such a move (creating an enterprise-wide social environment that’s also an app platform) that’s just not as clearly communicated.
In the end there’s a lot to be said — particularly in the sometimes uncertain realm of enterprise social computing — about having a secure solution that works across your application environment and is easy to integrate into your existing applications and user environments. And while the Salesforce ecosystem is far from a consistent application environment for most enterprises, which are a complex landscape of legacy systems from dozens of vendors, it highlights the next big shift: Intranets, portals, and software suites that are the integrating force of the social fabric for our organizations.
Chatter is a solid example of
October 25th, 2009
Are the iPhone and social networks making the classic Web and intranet obsolete?
Many as-yet-unforeseen new developments will create enormous societal, cultural, and business opportunities over the next decade, just as long as we don’t make irreversible decisions down the wrong path. There’s been an important and relatively sudden change taking place over the last couple of years in the way that we interact with the Web. While direct access or search activity has been (and still is) the most common way that we access the content and applications of the Web, new ways have been rapidly growing and competing with how we work online, both at home and at work.
Thus these new models, exemplified by social networking sites like Facebook or mobile apps on platforms like the iPhone, Palm’s new webOS, and Android, will ultimately herald a change in the way that we work with our IT systems in the enterprise.
The once relatively unified world of the Internet, with a few major top-level types of access directly connected to it (browser, e-mail, IRC client, newsreader, etc.) and a few key sub-apps such as search that virtually everyone online used have been extended — as well as fragmented — into popular new channels into which users are now rapidly moving en masse.
That’s not to say that direct usage of the Internet (loading up and using sites and apps via the traditional Web browser) is going away. It’s still far and away the most common way to interact with the Web today and will likely be that way for quite some time, if not forever.
But real shifts in both online platform alternatives and in the mobile market are beginning to usher in foundational new usage patterns by users. These new channels — of which the latest generation of mobile apps and social networking platforms, which are often tightly integrated with the Web but are not truly one with it, are just the two biggest examples — demonstrate what is probably a generational transformation of the vital border between us and the Internet.
And this is the crux of the point: Where the point of user attention and interaction resides and who controls it is one of the most important conversations between us and our “preferred intermediaries”, a fancy term for who we like to work with to interact with the Web. This in turn has significant implications for enterprise intranets, our often clunky yet essential local “Web” in our organizations.
Why are these changes happening? There are at least two major reasons:
The first is that user attention on the Web has been moving to social networks, best exhibited by Facebook, which has been the single largest gainer of online usage in the last 3 years, over all other applications. Even e-mail has been eclipsed in many markets and only search remains more dominant. Social networks, which are platforms in their own right — just like the Web, but also have touchpoints well outside of it — have come into their own as competing yet codependent platforms that sprawl across the Internet, telecommunications infrastructure, mobile devices, and desktop computers.
The second reason is
October 5th, 2009
Twenty-two power laws of the emerging social economy
Traditional measures of business success are becoming less and less important.There is a time for big picture thinking and there is a time for details in business and IT, the latter which make business and technical strategy a reality and the former which provides needed direction and focus.
Highlighting the big picture side last week we saw Steve Ballmer’s exploration of the efficiencies he believes are being driven by something he calls “the new normal”. In this view, he tries to frame up how a reset of economic expectations during the downturn has created an environment that is putting pressure on business to do more with less, affecting IT at least as much as the rest of the organization, if not more.
We’ve seen also seen similar and broader variations on this theme this year, such as John Hagel’s capable attempt to define the “Big Shifts” in business taking place in this century. Just recently McKinsey published a similar reported titled The 10 Trends You Have to Watch: And What They Mean For IT in the Harvard Business Journal (summary is by Gartner).
If we factor out the commonalities in these views, it highlights a core set of strategic trends in IT and business in 2009, namely:
- New resource constraints. Today’s new economic baselines (the downturn, green business, etc) are requiring that we find ways to accomplish our goals using fewer resources. This includes identifying the means to capture opportunity and transform “in process” business activities using newer, more efficient models. Business leaders will need to effectively link IT and business much more so than in the past to accomplish the movement to this new baseline. This also doesn’t mean everything is constrained. As we’ll see on the technology side, abundance is being produced that may address shortcomings in the business side.
- Value shifting from transactions to relationships. This is the growing realization that the traditional rote business transaction as the core source of organizational value is diminishing and value is now coming from relationship dynamics. This has many implications including using new management methods (example: from top down command-and-control to community curator and facilitator), tapping into new reservoirs of innovation, adopting new ways of interacting with customers, or driving better tacit interactions. Web 2.0 and social computing will be key enablers of this for business units and IT organizations that want increased relevance.
- Industries in flux with new ones emerging. Previously stable industries such as finance and media are feeling the pinch the strongest, but most others are as well. The recession is creating a bigger gap between healthy and unhealthy businesses while many industries are being unbundled or transformed into new ones (traditional software companies moving to SaaS and cloud computing for example or the rise of crowdsourcing competing with outsourcing at the low end.) Again, today’s dynamic Web-driven global knowledge flows and agile online models for computing and collaboration — as well as economic and intellectual production — are now a significant change agent.
- Moving from change as the exception to change as the norm. Today we’re seeing faster consumer behavior shifts, quicker pricing changes, more rapid product cycles, and faster media feedback loops. While this can also lead to more extreme market conditions, it also enables opportunities to be turned into bottom-line impact for organizations that can adapt to market realities quickly enough. The network is the culprit (and solution) for much of this again: We now have pervasive social media instantly transmitting and shaping cultural phenomenon and faster financial cause-and-effect in the markets, real-time online markets, and so on. In the 21st century, following a plan is increasingly less important than responding actively and effectively to change.
- A shift of control to the edge of organizations. This has been predicted at least as far back as the Cluetrain Manifesto, if not farther. It’s not even really a shift, it’s more like the addition of a new dimension to how we operate organizationally, something I’ve referred to previously as “social business.” This new addition changes the dynamics of where useful information comes from, how decisions are made, and how more autonomy and self-organization will be needed (and tolerated) in modern organizations to meet more dynamic and changing global marketplace.
As I explored recently in “How the Web OS has begun to reshape IT and business”, today’s Internet has become a central driver of how we do things today. It’s the richest marketplace that
September 6th, 2009
How the Web OS has begun to reshape IT and business
These days in the halls of IT departments around the world there is a growing realization that the next wave of outsourcing, things like cloud computing and crowdsourcing, are going to require responses that will forever change the trajectory of their current relationship with the business, or finally cause them to be relegated as a primarily administrative, keep-the-lights-on function.
IT is going to either have to get more strategic to the business or get out of the way. Businesses too must grow a Web DNA. The proximal cause of this seems to be the growing domination of the global network that surrounds all businesses today: The Web. If you’ve read my writings here since 2006 you largely know what’s happening: Today’s highly evolved Web has grown far beyond its original roots in content distribution and communication. It has become a fully fledged platform for media (TV, movies, music, newspapers, gaming, etc. have been strongly disrupted by the Web and now largely reside there) as well as more strategic pursuits. Probably most significantly is computing in all its many forms. This ranges from low-level services such as raw compute power and storage to social computing, semantics, and collective intelligence.
But the advent of a Web OS is certainly not just an IT story. It’s also — and really mostly — a business story. Those who are trying to track the so-called “big shifts” in the 21st century, thinkers like John Hagel, are attempting to pin down the specific changes taking place in the world today. John recently noted that “we are moving from a relatively stable business environment to one characterized by rapid rates of change with ever more disruptions generating increasing uncertainty and unpredictability“. In this way, routinely transforming instability and rapid change from a threat (which it is to most businesses today) into opportunity is a core skill that organizations increasingly must be able to cultivate.
That much of the pace of change today is driven by the modern world’s pervasive and instant global flows of knowledge is largely due to influence of the Web and its billions of two-way touchpoints with nearly a third of the world’s population (including practically all of the developed world). In addition to ultra fast feedback loops that drive real-time action/response scenarios in the marketplace, the Web has also become an incredibly efficient, inexpensive, and easy-to-use delivery system for just about anything that an interface can be wrapped around.
This has created a new form of leverage in terms of the ability to change and adapt by tapping rapidly and deeply into on-demand resources (be they computing, data, or even people and ideas) in virtually real-time. A recent article in the Wall Street Journal noted that because of modern technology, particularly the Web, business “initiatives that used to take months and megabucks to coordinate and launch can often be started in seconds for cents.” Clearly, this is a brave new world, even if it’s one that’s still happening more on the edge than in the core of businesses today.
WOA = Web-Oriented Architecture
CC/SRR = Creative Commons/Some Rights Reserved
AOP = Architectures of Participation
It’s a world where scarcity practically doesn’t exist and access to abundance is virtually free. It’s also true that the business models of the Web OS are only emerging as well. While monetization is prevalent for those consuming or participating in the Web OS, there is also a real and ongoing concern that it’s also the modern version of sharecropping. That traditional management approaches often don’t understand the nuances of these issues and aren’t designed to take advantage of this modern economic landscape, much less compete with a growing number of businesses that do, is a whole side story I’ll explore when I’m able. But it’s one in which the Web OS is increasingly forcing a serious reevaluation of modern business practices as well as the very notion of how an opportunity is defined, identified, and targeted.
What is the Web OS?
While there are multiple ways of looking at the Web as an operating system, from cloud environments that mimic a desktop operating system to sets of services packaged together and bundled as an individual product to companies, the largest — and the most significant — is the idea of an overarching and emergent Internet operating system. The data, services, and even communities of the Web are now programmatic and can be incorporated and remixed into any other business or product at will. The concept of a Web OS isn’t new. But its arrival on the scene in compelling form with serious impact to the enterprise is.
Over the last few years, as open APIs, social networking platforms, cloud computing, open identity services, sensor-driven databases (such as with GPS and OpenStreetMap), or even people (example: Amazon’s Mechanical Turk) have created open ecosystems in which anyone can participate, including business, both to contribute and to consume. The Web has become the ultimate outsourcing platform and one that is incredibly agile too, combined with economies of scale that are very hard to match. There are challenges too: Unpredictabilities and risks exist that must be dealt with both routinely and successfully.
But to perform well in this changing business environment organizations have to
June 14th, 2009
Cloud computing and open source face-off
Cloud computing remains one of the big topics in software this year despite considerable and ongoing concerns over lock-in, lack of control, and security. The siren song of ease-of-development, reduced costs, highly elastic scalability, and next-generation architectures has many in IT and in the Web community carefully weighing the benefits and risks.
This puts open source on individual installations at a distinct disadvantage with the cloud. Along the way, open source has become a key enabler for cloud computing by providing both cheap inputs (as in free) as well as rich capabilities to providers of cloud services. The writing, however, is beginning to appear on the wall: the cloud computing industry will use open source as leverage for a new generation of proprietary platforms-as-a-service, very much like the established Web 2.0 services in the consumer space have used open source platforms to capture and create lock-in around data.
Dana Blankenhorn’s coverage last week (”IBM expects Linux to make money“) of that company’s re-emphasized focus on the bottom line with open source puts cloud economics on the front line of major computing vendors:
IBM is tightly focused on server sales and the development of clouds, which can be sold, rented, or deliver profitable services.
For cloud computing, “why wouldn’t you run it on Linux?” [IBM's Bob Sutor] asked, because Linux can deliver all kinds of virtualization and those who want Windows desktops need never know they’re not.
Thanks to clouds IBM can profitably deliver thousands of desktops that look like Windows but have Linux on the back-end. It can also sell servers that are compatible with its clouds at the deepest level. [snip]
Sutor and Zemlin also discussed what might be called the “corporate-cloud boundary,” the point in the growth of an enterprise system where building a cloud starts to make economic sense. Clouds start to make sense when heavy virtualization takes place, Sutor said.
And Linux will make IBM money when used in cloud-based products which are metered to customers, often by the hour. One big reason that open source will help fuel the rise of cloud computing, while often becoming second fiddle to platforms in the cloud, is that software is only a component of a computing environment, albeit an expensive one and cloud economics almost always favor the incorporation of open source products. However, something that open source has only been partially successful at incorporating as a value creator (essentially, only the cost of development) is what IBM’s Sutor clearly stated: economies of scale.
It’s not that cloud-enabled services such as Ubuntu with Eucalyptus can’t provide cloud services; they can. However, they aren’t part of a finished solution and don’t create an ecosystem that provides intrinsic economic or technical benefits in a situated setting. This is because a significant part of building a robust and successful cloud computing environment is creating a complete and compelling finished solution that includes infrastructure, management, research & development, and support. All of these come together to create a service comprehensive enough that computing can take place, or significantly, can be an effective target environment for outsourcing. When a computing ecosystem consists of multiple stakeholders that depend upon it, costs and effort can then be distributed. The more customers a cloud provider has, the better the outcome for the cloud provider and its customers (eventually becoming “too big to fail“, an additional cloud computing issue that’s outside of this discussion, but an important one as well.)
At the end of the day, cloud providers generally have two major advantages they can
June 5th, 2009
Eight ways that cloud computing will change business
When a major change arrives on the IT scene it’s not always clear what the implications will be, if any, and so for large organizations a risk-managed wait-and-see attitude tends to prevail. Occasionally however some shifts offer cost savings, improvements to operations, or ways to tackle business problems that offer significant strategic advantage. The larger the benefit in one or more of these areas, then the more strategic the advance is and the greater potential it will impact the bottom line.
Cloud computing is quickly beginning to shape up as one of these major changes and the hundreds of thousands of business customers of cloud offerings from Amazon (Amazon Web Services), Salesforce (Force.com), and Google (many offerings, including Google App Engine), including a growing number of Fortune 500 companies, is showing both considerable interest and momentum in the space.
Cloud Computing: A delicate balance of risk and benefit
To be clear, there are currently unanswered questions and inherent challenges — even some major risks — in adopting cloud computing for more that so-called “edge” computing of minor applications and non-critical business systems. Notably, these include security of enterprise data that stored in the cloud, risk of lock-in to cloud platform vendors, loss of control over cloud resources run and managed by someone else, and reliability.
On the other side of the coin are some benefits that can potentially change the game for many firms that are willing to be very proactive in managing potential downside. These include access to completely different levels of scale and economics in terms of the ability to scale very rapidly and to operate IT systems more cheaply that previously possible. Easier change management of infrastructure including maintenance and upgrades (cloud vendors extensively virtualize and commoditize the underlying components to make them non-disruptive to replace and improve) as well as offering improved agility to deploy solutions and choice between vendors, particularly when cloud interoperability becomes more of a reality than it is today. Cloud computing also offers an onramp to new computing advances such as non-relational databases, new languages, and frameworks that are designed to encourage scalability and take advantage of new innovations such as modern Web identity, open supply chains, and other advances.
In fact, cloud computing holds the potential to dramatically change the businesses that adopt it, even if the technologies are only used internally. While these possibilities are only now starting to become clear, we can get a decent sense of these now:
8 ways that cloud computing will change business
- The creation of a new generation of products and services. The economics of cloud computing lets innovative companies create products that either weren’t possible before or are significantly less expensive than the competition (or just more profitable.) This part of cloud computing is an arms race and there are short windows of opportunity since competitors can often put the economic advantages of cloud computing into their product formulations fairly quickly once they see that it works for you. Where it gets interesting is that many business ideas that required prohibitive amounts of computing power, scale, or radically new business models (the aforementioned open supply chains and Global SOA) but couldn’t be implemented due to existing technical limitations or cost-effectiveness, can now be realized. Every improvement in storage, processing power, or technology enables innovations that weren’t possible before (high speed Internet, for instance, made products like YouTube possible) and cloud computing makes these opportunities unusually accessible. Smart companies will take notice.
- A new lightweight form of real-time partnerships and outsourcing with IT suppliers. Companies that did traditional outsourcing of their IT services a few years ago already know what this feels like; a large part of what used to be in-house is now being done somewhere else and changing anything is hard. But unlike traditional outsourcing of IT, cloud computing will provide agility and control that traditional outsource cannot match for the most part. Don’t like your cloud vendor? Unless you negotiated a long-term contract, you can often switch far easier than changing IT outsourcers. In fact, many cloud computing relationships consist of nothing more than a cancel-at-the-end-of-the-month commitment and corporate invoice. For many companies, this will actually be improvement over what they have now and give them choices they perhaps never had when everything required internal execution or to go through the outsourcing supplier relationship.
- A new awareness and leverage of
June 1st, 2009
Twitter on your intranet: 17 microblogging tools for business
Ultimately, if you want to use the right tool for the job, you’re probably going to need a specialized microblogging platform.So you’re bitten by the Twitter bug and want to bring the social messaging experience to work in order to connect with and share information conveniently amongst your colleagues. Perhaps you’ve even obtained permission to try out microblogging in trial form on your local intranet. You sit down and begin to see how you can adopt social messaging internally. It goes slowly at first…
As a Web-based consumer application, you quickly discover that while Twitter itself is a terrific environment, it isn’t very usable yet for businesses because of it lacks a variety of capabilities needed to fully work on the local intranet (details on this below). You wonder what other options exist to bring microblogging to the workplace in a business-friendly manner. Plenty, it turns out.
As we’ll see, choosing one carefully will be key to the long-term success of your experiment.
With the recent growth of Web 2.0 tools in the workplace (to about half of all organizations today), this scenario is becoming more common. The good news is that the broad success of Twitter over the last year has led to the introduction of a whole series of business-focused microblogging applications that bring many (though not yet all) of the necessary enterprise capabilities to the microblogging world.
What exactly is microblogging?
Read the rest of this entry »
April 18th, 2009
Google's cloud gets ready for the enterprise
Last week’s announcement of Java support for Google App Engine (GAE), along with a host of new features aim specifically at businesses, served to reconfirm the Internet giant’s interest in providing enterprises with its evolving cloud computing capabilities. So what’s new and what’s missing in GAE for enterprises that are looking to try out the cloud?
These additions move Google much closer to the enterprise space than it was previously, though there is still work to do.For its part, the enterprise software market has so far remained fairly resistant to Google’s offerings, which range from search to SaaS products, at least compared to the uptake in software from established enterprise leaders such as Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, and SAP.
But today’s increasingly broad interest in cloud computing may provide Google with an ideal opening. That is, if they can successfully deliver their unique strengths in the technical and economic underpinnings of networked computing in a form businesses find compelling for cutting costs, becoming more agile, and transitioning successfully to the next generation of computing.
The good news for Google: Of the big four enterprise firms mentioned above, only Microsoft currently has a credible cloud computing offering heading to the market with Azure, though IBM and Oracle are certain to follow shortly. Thus there is a clear opening for Google if it can offer businesses what they really need in the cloud before the leading enterprise software firms manage to arrive. It won’t be easy; the network is Google’s turf and it is clear that the platform wars have indeed returned, as I discussed a few weeks ago.
The original GAE was primarily a consumer Web application-focused cloud computing offering at the outset and was concerned about performance and high scalability much more than it cared about a robust feature set. It took cloud computing minimalism to a new level, though again, that was also about making it run quickly. GAE also required that you adopt its choices in programming language (Python), database (proprietary datastore), and request/response application model. And while it’s not giving these up, the latest additions promise to bring many of the capabilities and technologies that enterprises will require and open up Google’s nascent cloud computing platform for a much broader range of uses. As we’ll see, these additions move Google much closer to the enterprise space than it was previously, though there is still clearly work to do.
Let’s take a look at exactly what the new GAE offers from an enterprise perspective and then look at what
March 26th, 2009
Cloud computing and the return of the platform wars
Sun’s announcement last week that its new Cloud Compute Service would be API compatible at a storage level with Amazon’s popular S3 service is probably the first real evidence of the coming platform war in the cloud computing space. It’s a war that’s likely to be significant and protracted given the number of players that are lining up for a shot at what’s sizing up to be the next big development in the evolution of computing.
It must be easy to move existing applications and data into the cloud.The final outcome of this struggle, as it’s been in many earlier platform battles over personal computer hardware, operating systems, databases, and even the Web itself, will be the result of a fairly predictable and oft-repeated cycle of events (see diagram below) for which a small number of large winners are likely to emerge victorious.
When we look back many years from now, it’s probable that cloud computing will be regarded as both a momentous and major change of course in the history of software; many future computing platforms will be created and operated by what seemingly amount to utility companies. While this might seem like a boring future for computing, it’s a necessarily pragmatic evolution as the very size and scope of modern software requires new economic models in order to remain cost effective. Virtually any online application these days has to scale to a few million users as quickly and inexpensively as possible.
However, cost is just one of the interesting aspects of cloud computing and the stakes are huge: The Wall Street Journal reported today that the cloud computing industry is estimated to reach $42 billion by 2012, or nearly half the entire software business.
The world of software has recently, at least up until now, been moving slowly and steadily towards an increasingly commoditized, virtualized, and open sourced future. Cloud computing in its present form does appear to herald a return to the classical days of big vendor computing — and all the baggage (good and bad) that it implies — along with some unique twists of its own.
This means a lot of the old issues are back: Proprietary, commercial systems running our applications, very real risks of vendor lock-in, the requirements of adapting our businesses to difficult-to-customize one-size-fits-all computing models, and many others. While some companies are still dealing with these issues from the last round of computing platforms, a growing percentage of them have opted recently for more open and collaborative offerings such as open source, LAMP, and lightweight applications stacks from non-commercial vendors. Non-trivially, cloud computing also adds a number of all new concerns to the mix as well. Governance issues such as risk and trust are prominent as well as run-time concerns around the latency and performance of cloud-based applications.
The modern network era, however, has ushered in SaaS and Web 2.0 services which have been chipping away with a growing degree of effectiveness at the do-it-all-yourself view of IT that we’ve classically held for so many years. New computing models that take advantage of the inherent strength of networks to harness resources, distribute costs, and accumulate shared value have become compelling precisely because they’ve now become fully realized as products over the last year. They are now also (mostly) ready for prime-time for businesses to use and rely upon. This is true of both the open API model, which is a more application specific form of cloud computing as well as the more horizontal type such as storage, processing, and infrastructure, which is dominating the cloud discussion at the moment.
Cloud computing: A Faustian bargain?
Of course, many organizations would not consider dealing with these issues if it wasn’t for the
An internationally recognized enterprise architect and business strategist, Dion Hinchcliffe has been working for two decades with leading-edge methods to accelerate project schedules and raise the bar for software quality. You can follow Dion on Twitter.
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White Papers, Webcasts, and Downloads
- The Impact of Virtualization Software on Operating Environments VMware Today's use of virtualization technology allows IT professionals to ... Download Now
- Why Isn't Server Virtualization Saving Us More? A Few Small Changes May Dramatically Increase Your Efficiency VMware Companies have rapidly adopted server virtualization over the past few ... Download Now
- Can your business work smarter? IBM Today, productivity is at a premium and IT budgets are at a minimum. Work ... Download Now
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