Member Article

Storm Clouds on the horizon

How the disruptive force of the Cloud could threaten your business

With Steve Caughey of Arjuna Technologies Ltd

‘The Cloud’ has become the marketing term du jour, and everybody and his dog who has an IT product or service has leapt onto the bandwagon shouting “me too”. But, in a way, they’re right, for the cloud is fast becoming ubiquitous.

Fundamentally the cloud is about delivering service, and about decoupling that service from the physical infrastructure (the storage, computers, network, applications etc) that delivers the service. The cloud takes your demand for a service and dynamically assigns the necessary resources. It’s computing delivered as a utility.

A good analogy is with electric power. When you plug a device into your socket the electricity you obtain may have been generated in a nuclear plant in France or, rather more unlikely, from a wind farm in the Scottish highlands. But you’re not concerned with the details (at least at that moment of delivery, you’re not). You just want the power supplied to your device. So with the cloud, when you pull up a spreadsheet on your screen at work, or on your mobile device, the spreadsheet application might be run on a commodity Dell box, running commodity Linux, sitting in a lights out facility in India, whilst the data might be migrated to there from some huge, long-term storage rack hosted in Greenland.

So, why is this important for all users of IT? In economic terms the cloud benefits end users (both home consumers and businesses) because rather than purchasing dedicated resources (e.g. the home PC and the in-house server) which sit around unused for the majority of the time and require effort to maintain, resources can be assigned on-demand and paid on a per-use basis.

This pooling of shared resources significantly improves utilisation and delivers many other economies of scale. End users can then spend their money on devices for accessing and creating content, such as mobile phones, games consoles, HD screens, touch screen consoles, notepads etc, and save money on expensive PCs, servers, storage devices and, very significantly, on software licences.

Equally important, they no longer have to worry about routine maintenance - keeping patches up to date, managing licenses, back-up of data, protection against viruses etc. All of that annoying detail can now handled by the specialist providers, companies, like Google, Amazon and Microsoft, who will (and indeed already do) manage huge cloud facilities packed with tens of thousands of computers.

But, if there are winners, there will inevitably be losers. Who does the cloud threaten? We will examine this in more detail next week.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Supreme Ice Cream .