Processor Mag: A Look At The Forecast: Experts Predict An Increase In Cloud Computing In Data Centers’ Future - Carmi Levy

June 13, 2009

Although cloud computing is one of the hottest topics in the tech world today, there’s little consensus over how to define it. The future is a much different story. Everyone seems to agree the space will evolve radically. This change in thinking—and acting—is already underway.

Processor Mag: A Look At The Forecast: Experts Predict An Increase In Cloud Computing In Data Centers’ Future - Carmi Levy

Although cloud computing is one of the hottest topics in the tech world today, there’s little consensus over how to define it. The future is a much different story. Everyone seems to agree the space will evolve radically. This change in thinking—and acting—is already underway.

“Over the past two to three years, we’ve gone from a state where clients were simply trying to learn more about what cloud computing was about to a state where more of them are creating private clouds, consuming public cloud services, and investing time and energy to apply these technologies to their business problems,” says Dennis Quan, IBM’s director of autonomic computing. “Against this backdrop, it’s easy to anticipate very rapid growth compared to what we’ve seen in previous years.”


An Accelerating Rate Of Change
Quan isn’t alone. A broad range of experts agree that cloud computing is evolving rapidly.

“Just a short time ago, organizations considered the cloud as a delivery model,” says Patti Dock, COO of DataMotion (www.datamotion.com). “Today, more businesses are looking to the cloud as a means to reduce expenses, increase productivity, and quickly recognize savings.”

She continues, “This hosted ‘productivity model’ will include all the basics that SaaS models address, such as availability and scalability, but will also pay particular attention to visibility, transparency, automation, and adding intelligence to information in motion. Data has value when it’s in motion, so applying intelligence to information so it knows how to traverse the cloud will be key.”

As promising as that future looks, security remains a stumbling block to greater adoption. “Until we get over our fear that it’s not as secure as what we’ve been using all along, we’re not necessarily going to adopt full mainstream cloud computing,” says Sheryl Kingstone, director of enterprise applications with Yankee Group. “In the meantime, we’ll take on pieces of it that will make our lives easier. But it’ll take years before we can prove that it’s fundamentally ready to take over from more conventional approaches.”

Fear Of The Future
Kingstone says IT professionals who’ve spent their careers looking after tangible infrastructure need to update their thinking. “They have to realize that they don’t obsolete themselves out of a career path,” says Kingstone. “By embracing cloud computing, they make their jobs less maintenance-intensive. They spend less time keeping the lights on, which gives them more time to be much more strategic.”

Even so, cloud computing has already come a long way. “Just over a decade ago, the world was saying that software could never be delivered as a service. IT was the biggest bottleneck back then, refusing to accept its potential,” says Kingstone. “Now they realize that this approach really helps them.”

The benefits will extend more deeply into the enterprise over the next few years. “I think on-demand business services for fulfillment, order management, and other key business processes will expand the relevance of cloud services beyond the simple utility storage and compute power,” says Mark Skilton, solution director for global business solutions for Computer Sciences (www.csc.com). “I expect the desktop virtualization and the storage area to be the bridge point into the cloud as companies move low-cost, low-priority archive and data into the cloud. I think once this has demystified the cloud, it will then follow with other major integration and hosting developments in the cloud.”

Integration Is Key
That demystified future, Yankee Group’s Kingstone says, will need to be an integrated one, as well.

“Right now, you’ve got a huge ground-swell of everyone wanting mobile devices and apps,” she says. “There’s a huge bubble of social apps, collaboration, and connectivity. If you look at the network infrastructure, cloud services, and enterprise apps as SaaS, they’re all independent today. In the future, you’ll be able to get connected, collaborate, and do anything from anywhere on any device. You think you can do that today, but you can’t. The future is really going to be how we connect all these bubbles and seamlessly put them all into comprehensive business applications.”

And as applications continue their inevitable migrations into the cloud, CSC’s Skilton warns against assuming that’s the most important story. It isn’t. “The biggest game changer will not necessarily be the migration of application software into the cloud, but the movement of the services around software into a cloud-based model,” says Skilton. “This includes integration and customization services and the ability for enterprises to leverage these as tools to generate a competitive advantage.”

Whatever the future looks like, Yaron Sinai, CEO and founder of SaaS-based project management tool vendor Elementool (www.elementool.com), says it won’t happen until consistent Web standards are adopted for the cloud computing space.

“We need better options for different systems from different vendors to communicate with one another,” he says, adding that industry-wide standards must evolve before cloud computing becomes truly universal.

This opens up opportunities for forward-thinking vendors and resellers. Sinai says one-stop shopping will define tomorrow’s cloud computing marketplace.

“You need to have people who are specialized in integrating various systems,” says Sinai. “Companies prefer to work with vendors that provide as many solutions as possible under the same umbrella so they don’t have to spend time and money on integration.”

Processes Matter, Too
The future isn’t all about technology, however. Changes to processes and workflows could be even more significant.

“We’ll need ways to ensure public cloud services being consumed by internal constituents of an organization meet up with the policies and practices established for that organization,” says IBM’s Quan. “We’re in the early stages of that, but over time, we can expect security models and policies to become a lot more explicit and finer-grained so you have better control over the security of the information being put into the cloud.”

Quan says this is essential to ensuring smooth integration of cloud-based services into business and management processes.

Whatever form cloud-based services take on, Yankee Group’s Kingstone says it’s becoming increasingly clear that the cloud-based paradigm will eventually be a virtual necessity for business success.

“If you have not drunk the Kool-Aid, you’re the generation that will die out,” says Kingstone. “I like to compare companies that have no plans and refuse to adopt things like mashups, Web services, and social media to dinosaurs.”