Cloud computing is shaping up to be the single largest transformational event in information technology and management since the personal computer was introduced to corporate businesses in the mid to late eighties. This is because like the personal computer revolution, cloud computing has everything to do with how businesses will utilize these new capabilities. Not how IT will.
Cloud computing has been loosely defined as the aspirin that will cure whatever ails you, having come to mean just about anything related to the internet. While we all can’t entirely agree on what the cloud is or isn’t, one thing is clear. At it’s essence, the cloud deliberately intends to complete the abstraction of technology infrastructures in the modern business setting. Companies don’t care about CPU’s and storage, and bandwidth, or the facilities and resources required to house those things. They don’t care about software maintenance, patching and upgrades or database management and tuning either. The truth is they never really did. It was a prerequisite to reaching their business automation objectives and nothing more.
Cloud computing ushers in a new generation of information management solutions packaged as all encompassing, consumption based, scalable, pay as you go subscription offerings for businesses of all sizes, delivered via the internet. Businesses won’t be required to understand the nuances of these services anymore then they concern themselves with how phone calls are completed through the infrastructure of one or more carrier service providers today. You dial the number, it rings on the far end and someone answers. It’s an abstraction as far as the customer is concerned. Once upon a time in the not so very distant past, businesses employed telecom experts on their staff to ensure that those services were provisioned affordably and reliably. Except for a very small number of businesses today, this is no longer the case.
Decision makers for small and mid sized businesses in particular, have a set of improved information system alternatives to choose from that for the most part didn’t exist as recent as five years ago as a result of the advent of the cloud. The last great 1990’s single tenant, client server business application has already been delivered to the marketplace. With very few exceptions, every substantial, sustainable, commercially viable piece of business software constructed in the days and years ahead, will be engineered to leverage the attributes of the cloud.
It’s the owner operators and the decision makers for the small and mid sized companies who have either already redeployed their information technology systems into the cloud or are presently planning to do so shortly, that will be the winners and the champions for cloud computing.
Dave Rice CEO, TrueCloud
www.truecloud.com
