Cloud Computing Form Factors - The Future of IT

Tim O’Reilly posted following on the value proposition of the cloud a month or so back and I saw this worth revisiting given the inferences it places on continuous improvement and scaling down of TCO in the cloud:

http://radar.oreilly.com/2008/10/web-20-and-cloud-computing.html

Whilst the shared social graph utility is positioned for the broader community, there are lessons to be learned from this space. In particular, IT can experience economies of scale from the continuous improvement experienced with cloud applications. Users of these applications add value to them, through their use and continued refinement of both application semantics and taxonomy. When users are participants in IT rather than purely being service consumers, they help to distribute the costs of IT product evolution and process improvement, providing a broader set of perspectives and experiences to them. This approaches IT in the same way as any product or service marketed and sold to consumers and the enterprise. In the latter, customer requirements take a very high priority, yet are often dynamic and evolve rapidly. In this space, architectural and engineering decisions are reconciled to customer requirements with rigour. With such accountability, these decisions and their resulting specifications can more easily adapt to customer requirements as they evolve, documenting departures and differences along with plans to resolve them.

The benefits to business are fairly self-evident: lower TCO and greater ROI, the outcomes of better distribution of IT costs and burden and improved IT efficiency. The greater challenge is to convince IT that this can be done securely, yet in a more accessible, open fashion as required by the cloud. For too long, IT’s first priority has been to lock down applications and resources at the expense of their ability to be efficiently used by the organisation. The paranoid may survive, but they do they thrive? The global marketplace is rapidly increasing its mobility, and IT can only keep up its support of globalised organisations through increasing its mobility likewise. Even those organisations still adhering to the faith of brick-and-mortar have embraced the reality of a widely distributed workforce, of which IT is a part. Without mobility, IT struggles to maintain reasonable and basic SLAs within the context of unnecessary critical paths. 

The power of the Cloud is in its application to a Shared IT Graph Utility - where user participation-collaboration, mashups and rich user experiences utilising cloud services, IT can vastly improve the efficacy, provisioning, uptime and maintenance of enterprise applications. This utility, as recognised by the enterprise, is the future of IT. 

What sort of Cloud are we speaking about? This is the hybrid model - a mix of public and private cloud. What may this topology look like? Performance and operations costs being equal, hosting the data centre in an environment in which labour costs are lower will drive models which rely more on the external cloud. Operations costs and labour costs being equal, the data centre/cloud will be located nearest the centroid of the cloud-rovider's target market to optimise performance..Labour costs and performance being equal, data centres are likely to be hosted in regions in which power, service redundancy, security and other operational aspects are optimised.

Comments

[seosoeasy]

It was a great analysis upon IT.