Cloud computing Reshape IT

Cloud Computing Will Reshape IT forever

While end users may never even know that the application they're using is coming from the cloud, IT will be completely transformed, and the business as a whole will have an entirely new way of viewing, using and paying for technology.

For IT, cloud computing is as significant a development as the invention of the PC, or as the effect of the iPod on the music industry.

Think of it as utility computing on steroids or services sold by the drink.

Apple made the iPod a success by changing people's perception of music from a product to a service — a single song to download as needed, as opposed to a physical CD to buy in a store — and the cloud will have the same impact on IT. While end users may never even know that the application they're using is coming from the cloud, IT will be completely transformed, and the business as a whole will have an entirely new way of viewing, using and paying for technology.

"Companies that are smart are taking a look at the varied aspects of cloud and pushing certain applications up (into the cloud) and those that need unique distinguishing characteristics they push down (into the traditional data center environment)," says Doug Neal, co-author of the report Doing Business in the Cloud - Implications for Cost, Agility and Information, and research fellow with CSC's Leading Edge Forum Executive Programme. "IT has to realize that it's in kind of a precarious position. It can either accelerate this change and gain great glory or they can sit back in denial and just atrophy."

"The most important value the cloud brings is not lower costs," Neal's report states. "It is improved agility, not just for IT, but for the business as a whole."

That agility comes from the option to offload any aspect of a company's IT infrastructure to an outside provider, paying only for the services you need as you need them.

As an example, Neal says Eli Lilly used Amazon's EC2 cloud offering to add 50 servers in a matter of days rather than weeks to assist in the development of a new drug. When any delay in a pharmaceutical project can cost $150 per second or more, that's a huge difference.

What's more, when the 50 servers were up and running, Neal says, they quickly discovered they actually needed 250. "But this is Amazon, so they changed 50 to 250 and clicked 'Go,' and ran the whole shebang that day," he says.

And that's the power of the cloud: no provisioning, no waiting, just click, pay, and you're done.

"What the promise of the cloud is, in part, to begin to segment apps so that… for those few times a year I need extra capacity, I reach out to the cloud," Neal says. "So I pay with occasional opex for what [I] used to pay for with capex and, in the process, I could probably double, triple, quadruple the bang I get out of my data center."

It's a real wake-up call for IT, promising to remove the barriers between CPUs and the services that depend on them. Think of it like Moore's Law — every 18 months, you should be able to double the level of cloud-based services you can offer - or like a RAID for CPUs: a bunch of cheap servers that can be provisioned as needed to handle any load.

Even if a server or two fails, it doesn't matter: everything just fails over as needed to the next available processor, and all that matters is the delivery of the service itself. "Failure now becomes a routine way of operating and we just wire around it," Neal says. "Google has hard drives fail on a daily basis, Google has servers fail on a daily basis, and nobody cares."

It's like replacing fine china with paper plates. "Today's leading cloud computing vendors eschew high-end components and use large quantities of the cheapest hardware good enough to do the job," Neal's report states. "They assume some of this hardware will fail, so they use software that can adapt as necessary. This approach offers substantial savings in hardware costs, and even bigger ones with people."

Still, none of this means that you should close down your data center - the cloud is still relatively new, with many variables still waiting to be hammered out. Neal says it may be a decade or more before cloud-based business apps are the norm.

But in the meantime, like cell phones in the third world, the cloud will help many smaller companies access the types of services that used to be available only to the enterprise. "If you're a small or medium sized business, this is the answer to your prayers," Neal says.