IT: Cloudy days ahead

BANGALORE, INDIA: In the information technology industry there has never been a dearth for buzzwords.

While the decade that just went past us began with Y2K, it was quickly followed by SOA, BPM, RIA, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0 – the list goes on. But the end of the decade heralded a new buzzword that has since been much talked about, written about, sliced and diced in all possible ways – yes, I am talking about “cloud computing”.

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While the hype is yet to subside and there are a number of questions yet to be answered, it is slowly becoming mainstream. All indications so far suggest that cloud computing is here to stay and is going to have an impact on all aspects of IT.

While there are many definitions of cloud computing, the one that I think makes most holistic sense is the one given in Wikipedia: “it is a paradigm shift whereby details are abstracted from the users who no longer need knowledge of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure "in the cloud" that supports them”.

In the first wave of outsourcing enterprises outsourced non critical IT tasks such as application maintenance and in the second wave business processes that are of not any competitive advantage (example, payroll processing) were outsourced.

Cloud computing could bring in a third wave, where non-critical data and computing will be outsourced. While this is not entirely new (Salesforce and Google has been there for many years now), the impact is going to be more widespread.

Cloud computing platforms now offer the CIOs a much wider avenue to look at enterprise applications and data. This will force future IT strategies to include cloud computing and decide what needs to stay within the enterprise’s data center and what can be migrated to the cloud.

Cloud computing does not necessarily mean access is always over the Internet. Therefore infrastructure may need to be relooked at in the form of ‘private clouds’ that could host multi-tenant applications and data stores.

Advances in cloud computing also provide an opportunity for product vendors to look at web as a primary (and increasingly the sole) channel for delivering the functionality and services. Products delivered over the cloud are automatically deployed and therefore delivery becomes a non-issue.

The maturing of web 2.0 technologies and RIA has made the browser to give as powerful a user experience as a traditional smart client does. More and more ISVs are adopting this route. For certain other products, such as middleware softwares, cloud computing paradigm offers fresh challenges.

These softwares now need to manage integration of enterprise and cloud based application. As cloud computing becomes more prevalent, there will be business processes that will span across the enterprise as well as cloud and middleware softwares will have to evolve to support this paradigm shift.

Application development is another area that will be impacted by cloud computing. Developers will have to start learning and experimenting with cloud based technologies such as Microsoft Azure. Development and deployment on the cloud tends to be a lot easier where you bypass the entire hardware/software approvals and procurement process.

Conventional IDEs are evolving to support this new paradigm. Software engineering processes will have to be revisited to account for cloud based application development. In the cloud, basic software development lifecycle activities such as configuration management, build and release management, performance testing, etc. have a whole new dimension.

In the pre-cloud days, developers used to worry about interoperability between multiple technology stacks and platforms. With cloud in the picture, interoperability and integration will have to be looked at from a new perspective.

Cloud computing will also have an impact on IT service providers with newer opportunities in the cloud space. In the early days of cloud adoption opportunities might be related proof of concept development, prototype development and may be even platform evaluations. But as the platforms mature, there will be opportunities for migration of traditional custom enterprise applications, data and storage to the cloud.

There will be integration and business process management opportunities that will involve applications running in an enterprise’s data center and public cloud based applications.

While cloud computing could bring about a vast array of innovations and will have a widespread impact across the information technology landscape there are several concerns surrounding cloud computing that will have to be allayed before we see full-fledged mainstream adoption. The most important ones are around security and reliability.

How secure is the data that is stored on the cloud? How is the user privacy maintained? How are SLAs defined and met? Recent outages of public cloud infrastructures including Google and Amazon does not build confidence in the new paradigm. There are other concerns such as lack of standards for interoperability, and potential vendor lock-in.

But even with some of these concerns, the advantages that cloud computing offers outweigh them. This is a computing paradigm that offers great promise and one cannot choose to ignore. So better prepare for the cloudy days ahead!

The author is head of Collabera Labs.