There is no doubt that cloud and mobile computing models are driving
Gartner research tracks this type of activity, producing reports offering assessments of the “maturity, business benefit and future direction of over 1,900 technologies”. In theGartner 2011 Hype Cycle Special Report, entries were grouped into 76 different “Hype Cycles”, revealing the similar patterns of “over-enthusiasm, disillusionment, and eventual realism” that comes with every new technology or innovation. Hoping to provide guidance business IT decision makers, the report intends to inform businesses about when they should consider adopting technologies or IT models in order maximize the value of the approach.
Yet the market is bursting with definitions for “cloud computing”, and services providers offer their wares with varying levels of service and capability. It’s really difficult to compare one private cloud solution to another, as they are all seemingly offering the same value proposition described in the same language – and none of it really describing what the solution is, how the business takes the greatest advantage of it, and what disruption can be expected along the way. Layer on top of that confusion a big heap of expectation, and the belief that cloud computing technologies are somehow different from “real” on-premise systems in that they are not subject to the same potential for breakage, failure, or unexpected cost.
For example, even though Amazon may use the term “elastic”, cloud computing does not automatically create a stretchy and eternally-dynamic resource that can grow without end. There are still limitations and costs associated with growth.
There is also a great deal of hype around applications and their performance in cloud environments. When a piece of software is poorly designed and crashes frequently on a local computer or network, it is just as likely that the application will perform poorly in the cloud. It’s simply a reality of software that even great products that are designed to run exactly the way they are being run don’t have a guarantee that nothing will ever go wrong. With cloud computing models, however, there may be a service provider working in the background to manage the systems and keep things running. You simply might not notice the failures and hiccups as much, but they are still there.
And not all cloud services mean everyone is sharing servers and infrastructure. While the term cloud generally applies to multiple scaled systems, it doesn’t mean that everyone shares everything and benefits from tremendous levels of redundancy and fault tolerance. In most cases, a solution described as a “private” cloud means that the service has been customized for the unique needs of the organization, and that there are resources of certain types allocated exclusively to the use of that customer. On the other hand, a private cloud may mean that the system elements are all contained within the business infrastructure, providing “cloud” type of services but being delivered from company resources. There are a wide variety of ways to describe these configurations and approaches, and quite a bit of inconsistency in use of terminology.
The best thing for a business owner to do now is to just ignore the term “cloud” and simply consider how the business might leverage resources from service providers to gain more IT capability at reduced costs, and how outsourcing certain technology needs allows a greater focus on internal innovation and improvement. Centralized
Outsourced IT service, remote access and server-based computing aren’t new concepts. It still requires using common sense and reasoning when considering any change in business technology and the innovative application of IT in a business – this cannot be outsourced. When it comes to cloud computing… to put it bluntly, just avoid the hype and stay away from unrealistic
Make Sense?
J