Is everything old new again? As cloud computing continues to gain momentum, it is hard to ignore the decidedly “retro” elements of this approach to IT infrastructure.
The advent of distributed, massive-scale cloud computing today is enabling organizations in all industries to create environments reminiscent of the centralized approach to computing that was standard back in the 1970s and early 1980s. In those days, computers were usually time-shared among multiple users working on “dumb” terminals connected to a central mainframe machine located in some remote corner of the building.
Cloud computing makes use of the Internet to connect remote users to massive, warehouse-scale data centers that house large networks of processors and memory for crunching and storing data. The idea is to remove the burden of heavy processing from the desktop and move it into these cloud data centers, thus taking advantage of economies of scale and shared resources.
The cloud also allows organizations to leverage desktop virtualization and thin-client technology to recreate the corporate computing environment in a secure and controlled setting. This removes much of the cost and hassle of managing hundreds or thousands of desktop computers. The IT organization is freed from the tasks of patching operating systems, installing and updating applications, and ensuring that data is protected on each and every desktop.
In 2010, these factors helped cloud computing gain momentum across virtually every sector of industry, with several surveys indicating that more governmental agencies, commercial businesses and non-profit organizations have either already deployed some model of a cloud solution or have plans to evaluate a cloud solution in the near future. Most networking experts and technology analysts expect even more consistent and sustainable growth in 2011 and beyond.
Analysts at IDC expect spending on public IT cloud services to grow at more than five times the rate of the IT industry in 2011, up 30 percent from 2010, as organizations move a wider range of business applications into the cloud. The firm also predicts small and midsized business cloud use will surge in 2011, with adoption of some cloud resources topping 33 percent among U.S. midsize firms by year’s end.
IDC says the combination of an aging server installed base, IT managers’ increasing need to rein in virtual machines, and a general upturn in the buying environment is boosting sales of commodity-type servers used in public and private cloud-computing systems. IDC predicted that server revenue in the public cloud category will grow from $582 million in 2009 to $718 million in 2014. Server revenue for the much larger private cloud market will grow from $7.3 billion to $11.8 billion (about 62 percent) in the same time period, IDC said.
For many organizations, their experiences in 2010 proved that cloud computing can meet the demand for improved IT efficiency through a virtualized, secure infrastructure solution that is scalable, reliable and can provide organizations higher availability at lower costs when compared to a dedicated IT environment.
“There has been a clear market trend of small and medium-sized businesses looking to get out of the business of owning and maintaining their own IT infrastructure,” said Rahul Bakshi, vice president of product management, managed services, at SunGard Availability Services. “These companies want to tap into the investment service providers have made in IT tools, automation and elastic technology.”
While cloud computing provides a new twist on an old idea, there is no mistaking that it can deliver 21st-century benefits. The real advantage of this type of computing is mobility. End-users can access the corporate computing environment, including operating system, applications and data, from anywhere using a traditional PC, thin client or other network-connected device.
“Users enjoy the convenience of accessing their data from anywhere and at any time, so long as they have a network connection,” said network architect Cedric Lam of Google.
IDC expects cloud services and mobile computing to mature and coalesce with social networks to create a new mainstream platform for both the IT industry and the industries it serves. Frank Gens, senior vice president and chief analyst at IDC, says this new platform will deliver value-generating overlays of social business and pervasive analytics. In addition to creating new markets and opportunities, Gens said, this restructuring will “overthrow nearly every assumption” about who the industry’s leaders will be and how they establish and maintain leadership.
“What really distinguishes the year ahead is that these disruptive technologies are finally being integrated with each other — cloud with mobile, mobile with social networking, social networking with ‘big data’ and real-time analytics,” he said. “As a result, these once-emerging technologies can no longer be invested in, or managed, as sandbox efforts around the edges of the market. Instead, they are rapidly becoming the market itself and must be addressed accordingly.”
