Sunny Forecast for Cloud Computing
by Joe McKendrick
There have been plenty of new developments on the cloud computing front. HP has just announced it is delivering a range of virtualization and cloud-computing capabilities it brands as “Next Generation DataCenter (NGDC).” The computer giant said that it would be opening its data centers for customers to use on an incremental basis.
Cloud computing is truly this year’s rising star. Nick Carr also talks about the rise of cloud computing in this new article in Ad Age. Nick says it so well when he speaks about the paradigm shift that has taken place in personal computing:
“In a closet in a spare bedroom of my house is a crate of PC-software programs on CD-ROMs and DVDs. There are dozens of them neatly wedged into their plastic cases — financial programs, graphics programs, encyclopedias, games, business applications and hobby applications. And they all seem, suddenly, like strange artifacts from the past.”
Most of the value of PCs and laptops, Nick says, “comes not from what’s inside them but from the network they’re hooked up to. They’ve become, essentially, terminals.”
Such is also the case with enterprise computing. This vision, in fact, has been bandied about for the past decade, in fact, by enterprise systems vendors such as IBM and Sun Microsystems. Back at the turn of the century, Sun’s Scott McNealy talked about delivering compute capacity via a “Big Freakin’ Webtone Switch.” IBM has long talked about opening up pools of its vast reservoirs of in-house systems to customers.
HP’s new “Adaptive Infrastructure as a Service” (AIaaS) offers customers access to HP-owned and managed data centers that deliver applications such as Exchange and SAP, as well as “other critical business applications.”
On a practical level, cloud computing makes it possible for enterprises to break out of the cycle of paying more and more for the costs and headaches of building and maintaining their own data centers. As a result, organizations need not be anchored as tightly to the expensive investments made in systems, and therefore able to change faster and more flexibly. And no one will miss the long weekends required to perform upgrades.
Is there a down side to such rosy scenarios? Enterprises must weigh the costs of paying eternal monthly access and licensing fees versus one-time purchases for licenses. Plus, there are the risks inherent in relying on an outside partner for computing –a loss of control. Data security also rears its head, and needs to be explored further.
But, for now at least, the future of cloud computing appears to be anything but cloudy.
