Cloud computing: No more cloudy skies?

• The cloud is the new normal today; are you embracing it?
• Workloads moving to the cloud suggesting a hybrid cloud world

NO ONE would doubt that the past four years have seen significant changes in the enterprise IT landscape. The drivers of these changes are not new to those who have been following them.

Some of these include the increasing globalised nature of business, the upending of traditional business models by innovative startups, the growth of mobility through the power of smart devices, the rise of both fixed and mobile broadband connections, the pervasive use of data analytics and the up-and-coming ubiquitous use of radio frequency sensors to connect millions of devices together, known as the Internet of Things.

Underpinning these trends is the rise of cloud computing. The cloud proposition is undeniably valuable. The notion of having the ability to rent hardware and software on-demand and in a scalable way; the reduction of many companies’ dependence on IT servers, storage, networking and expertise to manage all of it; and the move away from a capital-intensive (capex) way of meeting IT needs to one that is based on operational expenses (opex).

Once misunderstood and feared to be an untrustworthy way of consuming IT services because it was thought to be unreliable, unsecured and too complex to manage, the cloud is today the basis of agile services that are being rolled out by enterprises that are forward thinking.

Werner Vogels (pic above), chief technology officer of cloud giant Amazon Web Services Inc, said it best.

“Before the cloud, I was buying everything from database software to server, networking and storage hardware and I always felt that I was never in control because I always had to buy what the vendor sold to me. I had to hedge and make long term contracts in order that I do not run out of capacity down the line.

“And after buying from them [vendors], after they’ve gotten their sale, some of them became disinterested in servicing me. Today with the cloud, this is no longer true as you only pay for what you use,” he said in an interview at the recently concluded AWS re:invent 2016 cloud conference.

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