Clouds
Cloud computing is transforming Information Technology
Making travel arrangements recently, I was struck by the impact that the Internet has had on travel. Before the Internet, going anywhere meant calling a travel agent, trusting that they found the best options for you, and waiting for tickets in the mail. It was a time consuming and costly process. Today, I can hop on Orbitz or Expedia and see every flight and hotel option available in seconds, and be booked, checked in, and out the door less than a minute later. The Internet has had a similar transformative effect on communication, entertainment, news, and even dating.
Why is it then that IT itself still operates more like a travel agent than an Internet travel site? IT itself is one of the last areas of business to be transformed by the power of the Internet. In a small business, if you want a new IT service you call your local IT provider, tell them what you want, they give you a quote, and a few days or weeks later they have something set up and running. In big businesses, product groups send their requirements over the wall to an IT team, who analyze the requirements, procure hardware, install it, configure it, and a few weeks (or months) later has it ready to go. Need an upgrade? Get ready to repeat the whole process.
Cloud computing represents an opportunity for the Internet to transform IT the same way it has so many other areas of our lives. Engineers can provision new servers in seconds with a few clicks, without needing to worry about capacity or capital budgets. Unlimited storage is available to anyone with an Internet connection and a credit card. You can setup an office PBX in minutes, with nothing more than a handset that plugs into your Internet connection. By putting all these services on the Internet and making them available through a web browser, we’re removing bottlenecks and allowing instant IT gratification.
Why has it taken so long for IT to improve the experience of IT? Imagine if traditional travel agents were the only ones who could build Internet travel sites. Do you think they would have been in a rush to do so? It’s clear there is a lot of fear in the IT community surrounding cloud computing, and much of that fear comes from a natural instinct for self-preservation. After all, who needs a mail server administrator, when there is no mail server? Who needs a backup operator, when there are no backup servers and backups are completed automatically and seamlessly all the time? The good news is that much of this fear is misplaced. As cloud computing transforms IT, IT staff will find themselves spending less time buying hardware, racking servers, and writing RFPs, and more time focusing on assembling and managing the best collection of IT services from across the Internet to improve their business.
There are still many legitimate questions and concerns about cloud computing. Will it really save money? Can it be as reliable as fully managed IT services? Who will I call when it breaks? What if the cloud provider shuts down? How can I ensure the security of our data in the cloud? These questions will take time to answer. Some of them will be solved through technology, and others will simply be better understood as cloud services have more time to evolve. The eventual transition is inevitable though – the Internet will transform IT just as it has every other part of our lives.
Defining Cloud Computing
On any blog dealing with cloud computing it seems one of the first posts is always the author’s attempt to define cloud computing. Cloud computing has become such a nebulous term that folks who write about it almost always feel a need to explain what exactly they think it is, as if it justify their use of the term.
The good news is that this has now been done so many times, I don’t feel the need to do it myself. My favorite explanation of cloud computing comes from Erik Carlin in Rackspace’s Rack Labs group, so if you still don’t understand what cloud computing is, read about it here.
For my part, I’m interested in all three types of clouds. Jungle Disk is a great example of a cloud application, which itself relies on an infrastructure cloud provided by Amazon S3.
For those readers who are still offended by the term “cloud computing” and think it’s just an overused buzzword for something we’ve had all along, all I can say is “blog”. Personally I always thought the term was rediculous. Personal webpages (geocities), daily news sites (Blue’s News), and random status updates (.plan files) have existed as long as the Internet, but somehow wrapping them with a bit of hype and the buzzword “blog” actually did drive an amazing amount of new interest and new content, some of which (like this blog) I hope you’ll find useful.
Even if you don’t think the ideas of cloud computing are all that new, I fully expect the huge amount of interest and investment being generated by the hype will create real payoffs in the end, which we will all benefit from.
