Whether you believe in the cloud or not, it's coming. Having said that, it's not a phenomenon that will immediately dominate the skies of the information technology (IT) departments; rather, it is starting out as another tool in IT's bag of tricks.
Over the next three to five years, cloud computing is set to occupy a larger space in computational models managed by IT departments, walking hand-in-hand with traditional computing and virtualisation. If you were to graph the distribution of what is used today by the IT departments in large enterprises, it would show that most of it lies in the sphere of traditional computing and virtualisation, with a little bit of flirting with the public cloud in the case of software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications for areas like human resources, customer relationship management and e-mail. Additionally, to IT's consternation, public cloud usage can also be found in the form of the unsanctioned use of third-party cloud sites by various business functions. Over the next three to five years, this is set to change. The private cloud will be a large part of the pie, along with virtualization and the public cloud.
Two types
What is noteworthy about this model we predict is that the lines between virtualisation and the private cloud will start to blur (there will also be a blurring between private and public clouds, as hybrid clouds become more of a reality in the future, but that's another story altogether). There are two ways to go about setting up private clouds, or really any type of cloud: evolutionary and revolutionary.
The evolutionary approach starts with virtualisation and is appropriate where large investments have been made and when you are talking about traditional enterprise applications. With virtualisation as the base, additional capabilities are then layered on (such as usage-based billing/chargeback, workload life cycle management and a self-service portal for users).
The other way to get to the cloud is the revolutionary approach. This is appropriate for greenfield opportunities within organisations, and is targeted at non-traditional, Web 2.0 applications that are “cloud-native” — applications written for deployment in the cloud.
The good news is that you don't need to choose. Organisations will use both approaches to get a private cloud. At first, the evolutionary approach will be predominant.
As more and more “new world” applications are developed for the cloud, the balance will begin to tip in favour of the revolutionary approach.
Whatever the approach, over the next three to five years, cloud computing will play a larger role in the IT portfolio. In the longer term, however, the elements and characteristics of cloud computing will be absorbed into IT and it will simply come to represent the way computing is handled.
The author is the General Manager (Large Enterprise Operations), Dell India
