Every so often there comes a wave of technology that promises to deliver the silver bullet of IT, currently we have Cloud, VDI, Converged Infrastructure and Unified Communications very much on the agenda of most CIO’s board reports.
One of the areas gaining massive hype is Cloud, which although new in marketing terms has been around for many many moons.It's clearly an overheated space right now, and many organisations are moving into cloud computing because of the hype, not for business and technology requirements and that will give cloud bad press long term as its the wrong approach.
The trouble is that most of what is said about cloud computing today comes from marketing departments and not thought leaders.
That said, there is true value within cloud computing. You just have to understand what's truly innovative and unique about it.
Cloud computing is the ability to use core infrastructure services, such as storage and compute power, over the Internet as true components of architecture in highly scalable and elastic ways. Storage and compute is nothing new, but the the model for consuming those types of services is new and innovative. Thus, the value is the concept of using these architectural components from an outside source, and paying for only the services you use.
A core value of cloud computing is speed to deployment, or the ability to get applications, storage, and compute services up and running quickly in support of the business. That leads to the value of agility, or the ability to adjust your IT quickly to support changes in the business. Another core value is the ability to shift capital away from IT and use it for more important things, such as running the core business.
When the hype finally clears, we'll begin the see the true value of the cloud, which is plenty and should be on your agenda for any new IT project providing its right for your business model.