Will cloud end up being the next IT silo?

BANGALORE, INDIA: Data silo gives jitters to every IT manager because it not only adds to data management woes, but also burdens a company financially. 

Information technology (IT), such as processes and data, is stored in various forms - either in compute, or network, or storage - forming silos. These silos in turn exist in their respective universe, completely cut off from each other. 

Also Read: Storage-as-a-service: Cloud Storage 

Jay Mastaj, senior vice president and general manager, EMC Ionix, Availability, says, “Corporate IT still holds a part of everything that is there in the environment. This creates a mess because it causes silos. This in turn brings issues while provisioning, as they have to work across the silos.”

So, in a traditional environment when an application goes down engineers across the IT fraternity, such as networking, storage and compute, are summoned to look into it. A fair amount of fortune, time and energy goes into getting the applications up and running.

However, virtualisation brought a substantial change in this environment as it brought the ability to consolidate server resources, adds Jay. What if it adds to the problem?

“Virtualisation also brings application mobility. So when you move an application, you do not even know where it is. Today there are no solution or product which can show what is going on in the network, storage, compute etc.”

Thus, “Instead,” he adds “of solving the existing problem of silos, virtualisation, in the form of application mobility, increases the problem as it creates one more silo to the existing lot. i.e. infrastructure, network, storage, compute, and virtualisation.”

So, today with cloud, said to be the efficient way of managing IT resources as it centralises storage, computing and server resources, can we hope that it will get rid of the silos built over the years.

That too especially when a lot of confusion still prevails over what the new technology is and what it can offer. More so because companies are only coming in terms with it now and are trying to understand what is a public or private cloud, or PaaS, or IaaS, or SaaS etc.

On the other hand, reports say that many companies have already started experimenting with the new concept and have also started deploying their applications on them. However, while building applications over several clouds, will they end up creating a new silo altogether?

Well, it will take some more time to how companies will be adopting it, as cloud is just in its early stages.

“Cloud is still forming, however, the momentum is building up fast. It has moved faster than any other transition in the past. Some people have taken the advantage of the early stages of the cloud. However nobody has yet brought any killer application yet, which would force people to take a serious look at it. Six months from now we can see more clarity on what cloud is, and who the players are and how it can benefit enterprises.”

We can only hope that by the time the 'cloud' over the cloud clears, more number of silos are not formed on the sidelines.

What do you think?