Is cloud computing the future?

Is cloud computing the future?

The “clouderati” would have us believe yes. In the future, Cloud Computing will be the only choice. The cloud is not new and for many it is mature: the airline industry has been doing it for decades and Hotmail was started as a service in 1996. Although the concept dates back even further to the pioneers like Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider and ARPANET project in the 1960s. The term “cloud computing” is attributed to Information Systems professor Rammnath Chellappa speaking at the INFORMS meeting in Dallas in 1997. According to Gartner’s hype-cycle analysis the technology is sliding into the trough of disillusionment.

So after all that we are still left with the question of what actually constitutes the cloud: well I see it as all of the highly integrated, massively scaled inter-connected: hardware, software and Information systems that are utilized to provide three broad categories of service: Infrastructure (IaaS), Platform (PaaS) and Software (SaaS).

This coming decade will see significant consolidation and the integration of work and enterprise clouds together with home-based clouds. However, Manley of HP sees the cloud development as a multiplicity of clouds suited to specific purposes. (Clark, 2012). Which take advantage of but do not reap the rewards of: massive scales that are offered by the Internet.

Over the next decade we will see the introduction of low-power consuming high-speed processors, housed in colossal automated datacentres which implement extraordinarily federated, scalable software architectures. (Clark, 2012)

The Forrester group estimates an economic industry value of cloud computing and services to be in the range $150 - $270 billion by 2020, currently size industry value are just 23% of that figure. In data terms this is said to be somewhere in the order of 35 Million petabytes of data, (Cohen, An unStructured Future For Cloud Computing, 2012), that is 35 x 2⁵⁰ bytes.

A North Bridge Venture Partners poll showed that scalability, enterprise agility and cost are the biggest drivers in the development of the cloud, with security by far and away the single most likely cause or reason of non-adoption. (Nusca, 2012)

Futurologist Doctor James Bellini holds that and is quoted as saying: “If you go forward to the 2020s a successful enterprise will probably have no chief executive, no headquarters and no IT infrastructure” (Martindale, 2011)

Clark holds that by 2020 the cloud is going to be a major and specifically permanent part of the enterprise computing infrastructure (Clark, 2012).

John Marley feels that: "Cloud computing is the final means by which computing becomes invisible” and goes on to comment that: “software is written in such a way that it goes through several filters before it interacts with hardware. This means that front-end applications, or applications built on top of a platform-as-a-service, will be hardware agnostic.” (Clark, 2012). This has been the holy grail for the software developer since the first differentiations in hardware that necessitated the subsequently expansion in platform specific software, and today presents many of the amalgamation issues faced with cloud development today. “Cloud applications will require a new programming mind-set, especially as they interact with multiple clouds.” (Clark, 2012).

On security Phil Robinson is quoted as saying “The only difference is that if a cloud service gets breached it hits the headlines whereas a rogue employee probably doesn’t,” (Martindale, 2011). Security is the principle barrier to adoption of the cloud; regulatory compliance and vendor lock-in finish off the top three (Nusca, 2012). Our free society is built for the provision for minorities, which means allowing other people to do things you do not necessarily agree with. The Personal Computer was a revolutionary force in this freedom. There is a ground swell of opinion that the cloud can easily be abused and as such cannot be trusted. (Bulldog Data Services, 2011)

As a new generation of CEO/CIO move into enterprises, they already have vast experience of a cloudy world. They have high value, positive experience of the “as-a-service” culture with the expectation that things are always available. “Cloud has made media and entertainment a fundamentally engrained, pervasive part of our daily experience and it’s shaping new generations of users who expect rich content on demand from the cloud to whatever device they’re using” (Skok, 2012). The cloud is both hardware and software; the cloud makes IT less complex, by removing these complexities we are unchained from understand the delivery mechanisms of the [cloud] and the interfaces we use to conduct our interactions with it [the cloud] to concentrate our efforts and energies into more profitable endeavours than worrying and deliberating the best IT solutions to our enterprise dilemmas.

Among the many things I have learnt about the cloud is that: SaaS rules! PaaS pops! And IaaS lags? I have also learnt that the cloud is disrupting most software categories. (Skok, 2012).

Efficiency appears to be a primary goal, but the savings portrayal is woolly. It is all about the: reduction of the cost for providing dollar per process functions, together with the datacentre.

Eco-friendly and environmental concerns raise their profile when considering the datacentre. The implementation of specific RISC based chipsets will dramatically impact on electricity bills and general energy costs thus contributing positively to the reduction of the carbon footprint of enterprises. The datacentre becomes an eco-system if you will: a form of biological entity.

Utilising this natural order of development metaphor we will see as in nature, there will be a stratification of cloud structures and cloud types and stacks, we already today stratify and differentiate the cloud as: infrastructure-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service or software-as-a-service. By the end of the next decade we will see the emergence of many types of cloud formats. There is, already market segmentation growing up around the cloud: Social commerce, Mobile commerce and Situational commerce are just three major categories. “The cloud is a key enabler as everything can be connected, validated and certified via the cloud.” (Skok, 2012)

The “smart phone” is a technology that will pull the: could towards fruition, by providing the major right of entry, as they are always on, typically kept on our person or a least in very close proximity and allows people to connect seamlessly and instantly with as a service providers.

First came the cloud, then came fragmentation and differentiation, then came the cloud. Often, it is the first vision and solution that provides the correct answer to a problem, the realm of the true visionary. The cloud has the ability to deliver size-specific IT as a utility service. We have a propensity for failure in computing projects and the successful development and integration will require us to fully understand technology and legacy data. As with all projects that fail it is not fully appreciating the requirements up front that contribute most to these failures.

Bibliography

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