Unless you have been hiding in a hole for over a year you cant have possibly missed the whole cloud thing going on – can you?… I’ve watched it from the side lines for a while now and listened to peoples perspectives and I have to say this is going to be a very interesting set of years coming up. Anyone who knows me well, knows I don’t say that very often!

Firstly I don’t think the phenomenon it really restricted to technology, its really the coming together of a number of factors that truly make this concept pivotal to IT groups.

• Scaling technology to this type of demand has matured to the point this is not longer a pipe dream
• IT is becoming more and more commoditized and is really merging with the business community
• Business is getting much more savvy with IT technology
• When IT gets in the way, the business will find a way around it

So before we start with the factors, what is a cloud? Fundamentally cloud computing is having a virtual resource available in a remote network. In theory it is infinitely scalable and easy to setup. Everyone knows about virtualization where the VM machines are running on a VM host (on their own machine or in the data center), a version of a cloud (Amazon for example) is really running virtual machines in a virtual remote cloud. You don’t need to get IT to allocation you hardware in the data center, as it doesn’t require any! The cost is money but the time to market should be pretty darn fast.

So lets get back to the list.

Scaling technology

If some one had told me 15+ years ago Google would have indexed and cached however many web pages they do cache, I probably wouldn’t have believed them. We are in a position today that few people could have imagined 10 years ago, fundamentally the cost and pure computing power has been linked together to drive cost per work unit way down and availability right up there. I applaud both the search engine teams and the VM companies for driving the innovation in these areas. We we now in a position where we can have virtual appliances out in the web that ‘really’ do exist and the framework to support them allows these to be replicated around the world.

IT Commodization

When IT started it was a highly specialist sector. The business tolerated the IT folks, on the grounds that they knew they needed them if they were going to stay competitive in the market. However if the business could avoid the IT processes it would no doubt try , especially if it would help speed up their time to market. IT groups have long been an aligned arm of the business where there was an uneasy relationship between the two. Now a lot of the specialism that required highly skilled individuals has been moved over to the computers them selves and the load on the IT specialists has changed some – but fundamentally the required skill sets have largely been lowered. I cringe when I write generalizations like that – but it is just that, in general this is true. In combination to these smarter more manageable systems, networks have become so good that supporting a system out of another country is nothing news worthy, in fact its often news worthy when companies DONT offshore. It is now normal to be able to shop around for your IT skills, and the business is not restricted to having the need to keep people local. IT development is going to get merged with the business arm, no question about it – and fundamentally makes sense!

Business is getting more IT savvy

Gone are the days that IT could say – no way “you” can do that. The focus of most tools sets these days are to empower the business community to feed them selves ( See “Give Business Users Control” http://www.intelligententerprise.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=217200041 as a recent example). Now days its not uncommon for the business users to be able to generate their own data analysis cubes and lever the data mining objects to perform very sophisticated analysis without needing coders, DBA’s or IT analysts. Since the tools are targeting to the business, the goal is to make it as easy as possible for them to get started. The problem for the business is that while it is easy it doesn’t necessarily mean it scales.

If IT gets in the way, the business avoids it

This one is the kicker. IT is often beaten by the business for not doing x,y,z (and sometimes appropriately – but I wont go there for this article ) . As such IT is often forced, coerced or suggested that they use more process to help avoid any previous issues (aka ‘opportunities’) . All sounds good, the problem is while process is inherently a good thing, it often adds in project lags (due to following the process). Sometimes to the point where if the project was done the value of the project is minimized to such a point because of the amount of time it takes to come to market. This is obviously not business friendly! So with the advent of the cloud computing the business is in the position to get a virtual ‘appliance’, and possibly start to use this without even involving IT groups. None of the normal safeguards are really in place any more.

I suspect the advent of the cloud architecture will be something similar to the RAD revolution that happened over a decade ago. All good stuff, but it needs to be managed well – or long term sustainability of that specific project will be jeopardized.

But I think the whole cloud concept is a winner, more by nature of the conditions and timing than pure technology, but its here to stay.