Cloud Services are Eating the World. Today, economics are driving decisions to go the cloud. If you are a CIO you probably spend 50 percent of the budget on people, while a significant part of the remaining budget could be spent on buying hardware and software and, in essence, trying to replicate a data center as part of your IT infrastructure. It would be impossible for your team to achieve the same level of security, redundancy and uptime that you could purchase from a cloud hosting provider as well as using commercially developed cloud applications.
Two decades ago, if offices within a company were connected, it was done via leased lines. Today, it is most likely done via the Internet. Data is flowing over the unsecured public data highway, so security is critical, particularly as more workers switch to remote and mobile work. Infrastructure and applications are exposed to the outside world.
At this point in the cloud evolution, most new cloud 2.0 applications are architected specifically for the cloud. This means that the performance and response time is higher than the first generation of cloud applications, which were just old client/server applications retrofitted with web interfaces.
Around 2013, Moore’s Law started to run into the constraints of the laws of physics. Approaching very small size, transistors are less reliable. Consumers of computing power have enjoyed riding the wave of inexpensive computing power in increasingly smaller devices. However, the cost to research, test and manufacture each new generation of chips is directly opposite. All these costs have steadily increased and are anticipated to increase exponentially over time. This is better known as “Rock’s Law”.
Strangely enough, companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon are creating a tectonic shift in the chip industry as they demand different chips to power the next generation of cloud computing. In essence, the chips they demand are required to analyze massive amounts of data rather than just compute. The chip companies are investing in this new generation of R&D and manufacturing and leaving behind the legacy of Moore’s Law. Given this significant industry sea change, it makes even less sense for a CIO to invest in creating a standalone data center. It makes economic sense to ride the new tsunami wave of the cloud.
LATEST 