Tuesday, August 5, 2008

Cloud Computing: Anything as a Service


By Tony Kontzer
2008-08-05

In the future, it won’t matter where your software lives. “As a matter of fact, if you have it on premise, you’re short-changing yourself, because you’re throwing half of your resources at supporting that server infrastructure,” Menefee says.

Most CIOs continue to depend on those server infrastructures for a simple reason: They’re not convinced cloud computing is ready for prime time. If the ramblings of cloud computing user groups are to be believed, the real question isn’t whether the technology is reliable enough to pass muster with big corporate IT shops. The crucial question is whether it even matters.

For those weighing such concerns—and after the high-profile outages that hit Amazon.com’s Simple Storage Service (S3) and Apple’s first cloud computing effort, MobileMe, last month, many are—consider this posting of a Google user group member: “Anyone who thinks that the cloud, or even their own data center or infrastructure, should provide the reliability has it backward. If you want real reliability, write more resilient applications.”

Think of it as a Clintonesque take on the digital age: It’s not the infrastructure that matters, it’s the applications, stupid.

Regardless of one’s views on the readiness of cloud computing to meet corporate IT needs, it’s a development that cannot be ignored. Like it or not, the idea of renting applications, development platforms, processing power, storage or any other cloud-enabled services has emerged as a replay of the Internet’s rise as a business tool: It’s a potentially game-changing technology that’s expected to reshape IT over the next decade.

But IT executives are wary of cloud computing for reasons that go beyond the perception of unreliability. They’re fearful that their data won’t be safe in the hands of cloud providers; they’re convinced they won’t be able to manage cloud resources effectively; they’re suspicious of providers that won’t share details of the infrastructures supporting their cloud environments; and they’re worried that the technology could threaten their own data centers, or even their staffs. Collectively, these fears are helping to hold back a cloud computing market that Merrill Lynch estimates could be worth $95 billion in five years.

More importantly, analysts say that if CIOs let these fears paralyze them, even temporarily, odds are they’re just delaying the inevitable. In the meantime, business executives, salespeople and even rogue IT workers are using their corporate credit cards to tap their expense accounts or departmental budgets to pay for subscriptions to cloud services.

“If you’re a large enterprise, somebody in your organization is using cloud computing, but they’re not telling you,” says James Staten, principal analyst at IT adviser Forrester Research. “So there’s a good chance that in the next five years, you’re going to inherit things that were born in the cloud anyway, and now you’ll have to manage them.”

http://www.cioinsight.com/c/a/Strategic-Tech/Cloud-Computing-Anything-as-a-Service/

3 comments:

Harvey said...

Hey man, did you already receive your Cherrypal computer? Their website promotes shipments from end of July but there are no updates on the date. Furthermore I have just checked their online shop but they do not accept any order at the moment. Is this Cherrypal just a well organized fraud?

Solmn said...

Hi Harvey, Thanks for visiting CherryPal for Everyone! There's something in the tech industry called "pre-announcing" based on the best information known at the time. I don't work for CherryPal, but I do know about the complex contingencies involved in delivering a product and there is much that can go wrong. So the game is to announce a product, get the word out via a press release, get people talking, anticipating and excited. I expect my CherryPal C100 to arrive any day now. In the interim, I am learning more about cloud computing, green computing, the competitive space and pumping up this blog. Thanks for contributing, and keep coming back!

Unknown said...

That was a great informative blog on Cloud Computing and its services. Thanks for sharing it here. I am very much interested to know more about Cloud Computing and its services. I got a good opportunity to gather more information about Cloud Computing and also got a good chance to meet and talk with the world's leading experts of Cloud Computing through the World's largest and 1st annual conference named as Cloudslam09 conference. which is an virtual event.

About CherryPal for Everyone (CP4Every1 or CPFE)

CP4Every1 is constantly crawling the web (on human hands and knees) to find unique information of value regarding green technology, cheap and reliable connectivity, personal, portable and sustainable industry developments, future and social/cultural transformative technology, political relevance and news that is NOT just another re-posting of the same press release pushed out by the industry.

Please note that all copyrights and links to original material are provided and respected. NO robots were used to post content.

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