Cloud – Where are we?

Organisations that haven’t done at least a cloud IaaS pilot by now will find themselves very much at the trailing edge of adoption. The larger the organisation, the more likely it is to be doing things in cloud IaaS.

What’s also interesting is that many of these late adopters are bypassing years of early evaluation and moving directly to significant projects with more ambitious goals. Their initial concerns of vendor lock-in and poor security have been addressed and this is driving the faster pace of their investment.

Software-as-a-service platforms are providing a compelling way for businesses to save money on the cost of licensing, management, and deployment of software and hardware for productivity and collaboration. Infrastructure-as-a-service is also predicted to grow rapidly as a platform for businesses to host their own SaaS solutions.

Open cloud APIs and standards are also being established that allow for the portability and control of data and cloud-deployed applications, providing business with the necessary flexibility to tailor solutions to their short and long-term goals.

Open APIs and standards are helping to establish a market that fosters innovation and differentiation within the cloud space. The ability of companies to competitively assess vendors on availability and performance gives them the confidence to make cloud investments.

Federated cloud environments are being developed that enable businesses to select from the available vendors to build interoperable multi-cloud environments, choosing the components that best fit their particular needs.

Cloud benefits such as on-demand pricing that lowers capital expenditure, fast deployments that allow businesses to remain agile, reactive scaling both up and down, and flexible APIs that allow for the automation of infrastructure orchestration.

We would add that in our view the most successful Cloud initiatives will be guided by experienced and highly skilled personnel including an enterprise architect. This ensures that there is a comprehensive and well thought through framework for application development and operations. The focus will be on faster delivery (i.e., business agility), continuous integration, continuous deployment application lifecycle management and IT Service Management Design.