IT Evolution – Progression towards Cloud Computing (Part III)

Posted By Afif Fattouh on December 10th, 2009

(Earlier blogs in this series – Part I and Part II)

Part III – Cloud Computing

A good definition of cloud computing can be found from many sources, so I will spare myself from coming up with my own definition.

In my opinion, the following two trends in IT Management and Technology development set the foundation for cloud computing -

Technology developments in managing large scale web applications, like rapid & dynamic provisioning, virtualization, etc.
- SLAs took precedence over where or how application or data resided in the data center
IT’s Increasing reliance on Service Providers
- Realize benefits of using shared resources – resources of Service Provider being shared by many of its clients and hence reduces cost
- Vendor Management as a core competency of IT

The above trends will contribute for greater acceptance of cloud computing going forward.

The technology developments mentioned above were adopted in the in-house data center, giving raise to the term Internal Cloud. External Cloud is delivered by vendors, and popularly known as SaaS, PaaS, Iaas (or ‘X’aaS).

While IT can play a vital role in corporate business innovation, it is abundantly clear this is not going to happen by IT spending most of its time and resources managing commodity technology stack. (Nicholas Carr’s books “Does IT Matter” and “IT Does’nt Matter” are good reading in this area) Cloud computing provides an opportunity for IT to get away from from mundane tasks and focus on what really matters.

Embracing Cloud Computing

So how does IT deliver using cloud computing? unless absolutely necessary, leverage service providers. Based on this thought, we can envision the following categories of applications -

Developed and deployed in house
- Highly specific and customized business processes – this category would not be serviced by service providers (as their value is in reusing across many clients) and hence are to be developed and deployed in house. (Ex. Stock trading application where every fraction of a second matters)
- Highly regulated data/information that has to stay in house
Developed in-house but deployed at Service Provider (Platform as a Service or Infrastructure as a Service)
- Specific business processes that provide competitive advantage (Ex. An organization has differentiated itself on a highly complex and proprietary Inventory Management or supply chain process)
Generic Applications ( Software as a Service)
- Generic processes that are similar across enterprises and do not provide much competitive differentiation (ex. many HR processes like payroll, benefits management etc., some productivity tools)

the below picture is a shot at how IT services is delivered with adoption of cloud computing.

Adopting cloud computing, while simplifies much of IT operations, introduces a whole lot of management issues to IT. Ex. how to keep track of the information assessts that is now spread across many service providers where IT has no direct control? Integration and Security challenges, etc. In my next post I will address some of these newer challenges to IT.