The enterprise IT landscape: Five key ways it will change The more IT managers (of which I'm one in my day job) I talk to, the more I head people wondering where IT will be going over the next five years. The times are, as a Mr. Zimmerman sang in 1964, a-changin': but what will be different? I reckon things will evolve in five key ways. Cloud storage Storage in the cloud is already …
But why?
Why is email so much more stable in the cloud? Have you switched email systems? Is gmail inherently more stable than exchange? Is it load-balancing, (which still costs a pretty sum) which makes the difference? Is the storage system more stable?
I get that there are lots of complexities and costs in a properly designed solution. However, I begin thinking, "Where are the system integrators?" Cloud doesn't change its design to suit you, so why not roll out cloud by the rack in a standardised format. We're trading hardware (cheap) costs for labour (expensive) costs. There are private clouds out there, but if you have lots of people in an office, why are you putting all their resources at the other end of a WAN link? So disks fail... you can have a little light on the front which tells you, a helpdesk ticket which tells the admin and a cupboard full of spares and a wireless webcam on a hat for the non-techy so they can be guided through the hot-swap replacement.
Does it really come down to the fact that retail IT is ludicrously more expensive. What exactly are the oft-mentioned economies of scale? Are the SI's so unskilled that they can't roll out racks of whitebox servers and still manage them effectively?
What exactly is it that makes vendor cloud so cheap, and why can't it be pushed into on-premises racks so I can run it locally?
My humble opinion is that the secret here is that cloud is sold as a service, which removes all the second guessing and kibitzing from both within and outside of IS. Too often IS managers get drawn into compromises on internal systems to conform to the legacy kit already on site. Cloud makes it a business service decision. That allows the cloud vendor the greatest latitude to architect and operate a solution which meets both the internal business costing model and the business needs of the customer. Most large businesses are so weighed down with legacy and internal politics that only the most disciplined can ever manage to do this themselves. I would argue that only those companies that are themselves highly technical ever really manage to do this. The rest of the world is the reason that out sourcing goes through period cycles, and cloud is the name of the latest variety.
“This section may be too technical for most readers to understand”.
“If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself.”
― Albert Einstein
Us lowly IT operations people have to explain complex issues to people who don't understand and don't want to understand, so I have little sympathy for people who refuse to explain issues comprehensibly to people willing to learn.
If somebody can't explain an idea to an already highly educated audience who is used to dealing with highly complex abstract ideas then I think that person should have to justify placing themselves above Albert Einstein.
It seems inevitable that cloud is going to take over, like it or not. Every software company which has been created in the last 10-15 years, since SFDC, is natively SaaS and generally only SaaS. The major players, Microsoft, Oracle, IBM... not so much with SAP, are aggressively moving their portfolios to cloud. Unless you are going to roll your own across the board, you will be in the cloud by default in a few years... not even a decision point in the future.
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