Say hello to cloud computing, it is something you will get to know well over the next 5-10 years as most information technology moves to centralized servers instead of inside the corporation data centers.
When energy was first produced by harnessing the wind or putting a paddle wheel on a river, it was all created and used locally. Few economies of scale, lots of maintenance issues, and generally a hard way to do things.
Corporations have built vast empires of servers and staff to service their IT needs over the last 60 years. What has resulted has limited economies of scale, lots of maintenance issues, and a generally hard way to operate. Corporations that hired great IT people did well, others not so well. Even world renowned companies like Sony had their systems broken into, with only the internal people to hold accountable.
The cloud helps these problems in several ways. Security can be watched more tightly (Fort Knox versus a bunch of local branch banks), economies of scale can apply, and the Cloud providers provide a level of liability protection that internal IS people have not since they are part of the host corporation.
Will there be problems? Of course. Disasters and embarrassments? Inevitably. Is this progress or the "next wave" of computing? Yes it is.
Interoperable data will allow rapid collaboration between the cloud applications, stepping up the pace of innovation and cooperation.
Will this affect everyone? It already has as major businesses like EBAY and Amazon and SalesForce.com all have conducted business from a web hosted environment. It has worked very well, and the cloud is the next step toward making this model pervasive.
Will this move 100% of everything? Nope. There are some sensitive applications that will defy the trend, and there will always be the need for some local data (spreadsheets, word docs, etc) for convenience.
Times are changing. Don't get left behind.
Wednesday, August 10, 2011
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