Today, I saw a little doll with the name 'Benign Girl' - a perfect example of online dictionary Chinese marketing gone wrong. When I say word associations and the word, 'benign', many people would say 'tumour' - not so? Not something I would necessarily want to associate with a doll...
Cloud has unfortunately also been blighted with similar word associations. If I say 'cloud', people think 'Internet', and even worse, if I say 'moving to the cloud', people tend to think 'rip and replace', which in turn translates into a forklift taking all of my precious IT infrastructure and dumping it onto the 'big bad Internet'.
Cloud presents new opportunities to provide new, targeted services.
Gareth James is solution strategist at CA Southern Africa.
Even Microsoft has recognised this, and is changing its messaging from 'moving to the cloud' to 'accessing the power of the cloud'. A lot of this mindset is due to the fact that virtualisation vendors have wanted to 'rip and replace' existing infrastructures, and this messaging has carried over into their cloud messaging.
As good as a holiday
So will cloud computing rip and replace all existing infrastructure?
Not anytime soon.
Will it change the way business is done? Absolutely! The iPad/tablet market is a pretty good analogy. iPad sales have actually overtaken PCs as the single largest individual vendor - but they haven't replaced the PC market by any means. Cloud, in the same way, won't replace the traditional market, but it will present a new and innovative way of doing things. Cloud represents a lot of the same attributes - fast, agile, consumer-focused. This is a growth sector that will drive innovation.
Cloud presents new opportunities to provide new, targeted services. If a business builds its own private cloud platform, or uses a public cloud, it can provision new services very quickly and at low cost. Low-cost cloud platforms are the key to building new services.
A lot of cloud solutions being touted today are not low-cost, and this is because they are an extension of traditional infrastructure - that is to say, a brand new hardware stack plus new cloud features.
Clear as clouds
Cloud platforms can be split broadly into two categories: what I will call 'cloudification' and 'pure cloud'. Cloudification takes existing infrastructure and adds self-service and metered usage to a resource pool of virtualised infrastructure. Pure cloud, on the other hand, builds an entirely new platform on commodity hardware. Cloudification should not be dismissed out of hand by any means; it adds value to what a company already has - specifically in terms of agility.
Pure cloud, on the other hand, looks more like public cloud in how it is built - low-cost commodity hardware scaled out rather than up (scales up means bigger servers, whereas scale out would mean lots of small servers).
Hardware vendors are only interested in 'cloudification' for the simple reason that they don't make good margin on low-cost commodity servers. Hardware vendors make money when the solution scales up rather than out. Cloud platforms that scale out equally well on any hardware are not the kind of solutions that would be favoured by hardware vendors.
Cloudification does, however, have a valid place in the ecosystem; some services have been architected in such a way that they still require a scale up design. Furthermore, companies won't be able to take everything to the cloud, and not all services will benefit the same way from having extra agility. Re-architecting these legacy services may add costs without the value.
Pure cloud is the piece that businesses are struggling to get to grips with. These are typically software solutions that require only commodity hardware. Pure cloud is finding its place in the enterprise in the development/test space and in new projects. This is a certainly a good place to position it. In these areas, companies can get the full benefits of the agility and flexibility of a cloud platform.
Cloudification means that business users can utilise infrastructure on-demand - and the most typical use case is infrastructure as a service (IaaS). IaaS is easily accessible and understandable - it entails providing a virtual machine of the company's chosen operating system on a hypervisor (VMware, Xen, Hyper-V, KVM, etc). Pure cloud is also able to provide IaaS, but it is also commonly used to provide both platform as a service (PAAS) and software as a service (SaaS). Looking to the future, businesses will start to look further up the stack to PaaS and SaaS as the way forward. Pure cloud means providing more of the building blocks from the outset, such that a company's services can be provided on pre-built foundations.
What space will cloud fill?
This is a question in the mind of business owners. The average business will have a requirement for cloudification of their existing enterprise services.
Cloudification takes them to the next level of maturity with their existing infrastructure, giving the business direct interaction with the services and adding cost transparency.
Pure cloud gives them a platform upon which they can rapidly build new services to offer both to internal and external customers.
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