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Cloud Computing has gained global acceptance in 2-3 short years! Infact, very few actually knew what cloud computing was just 5 years back. But today cloud computing is changing how we build our web applications!
According to a recent numbers published by a survey conducted jointly by BitNami, Cloud.com and Zenoss, show that 80% of the companies today already have a cloud computing strategy or are in planning stages right now!
Cloud computing has become so mainstream that Google recently launched a Mobile device or netbook (or Chromebook) that works only on the cloud using only the Chrome Browser as the Operating System.
Here's a survey that has come out with an interesting infographic on outlook of Cloud Computing.
Was 2010 the year small business IT took the cloud computing plunge? Yes and no.
A company called 7th Sense Research recently conducted a study on cloud computing in small business computing environments on behalf of Microsoft. According to the study, 29 percent of SMBs see the cloud as an opportunity for small business IT to be more strategic; 27 percent of SMBs have bought into cloud because it integrates with existing technology investments and 12 percent of SMBs have used cloud computing to start a new business.
But at the same time, small businesses overall are largely unfamiliar with cloud computing. "Roughly 20 percent of SMBs claim to know what cloud technology is," said Josh Waldo, director of SMB Marketing at Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT).
Those numbers don't seem to jibe, but Waldo noted that while people may not identify with the cloud computing term, that doesn't mean they aren't using the technology. For instance, many people use Gmail or Hotmail -- prime examples of the software as a service (SaaS) form of cloud computing -- without ever realizing they're tapping into the cloud.
"People might not understand what cloud is," he said. "But they are using it. They're using in their private life. In some cases they're using it in their work life. But they might not necessarily identify it with the term cloud."
Waldo believes small business's lack of familiarity concerning cloud computing is an opportunity for Microsoft and other providers of small business technology.
"For Microsoft, what that means is that this gives us a big opportunity to really educate SMBs about cloud technologies and how they can benefit their business," Waldo said. "Our goal is really going to be to help SMBs evolve how they think about technology."
The benefits for small businesses that embrace cloud computing are potentially enormous, according to Waldo.
"First, SMBs can get enterprise-class technology at a fraction of the price, where you're not purchasing on-premises technology that's going to cost you an enormous amount upfront," he said. "Second, it really allows companies, whether you're a development shop and you're building software, or you're an end customer -- like a financial or insurance firm -- to focus on your business rather than your IT requirements."
For instance, by outsourcing datacenter needs, small business IT no longer needs to build out capacity to handle potential spikes in data processing or transaction processing. Instead, they buy the processing power they need as they need it.
And that leads into another of the key benefits of cloud computing according to Waldo: elasticity and the expectation of mobility. Elasticity, he explained, is the capability to scale up or down rapidly based on your needs.
That includes adding processing power as needed, but it also means being able to easily add new users from a seasonal workforce without all the headaches of per-seat licensing that can come with traditional desktop software.
As for the expectation of mobility, Waldo noted that today's employees -- armed with notebooks, smartphones and tablets -- have the desire to make their work more flexible by making it mobile. By exposing core applications as SaaS via the cloud, SMBs can let employees access the information and applications they need while on the go.
Small Business Technology : Embracing Cloud Computing
For SMBs that have decided to take the plunge and add cloud computing to their small business technology portfolio, where's the best place to start? Waldo recommends getting expert advice.
"We really think it's important that SMBs choose carefully," Waldo said. "If they're uncertain, they should work with a third party or a consultant or a value added reseller or some type of agent who understands the various elements of cloud technology and [who] can advise clients."
Nate Odell, director of marketing at Skytap, a provider of cloud automation solutions, said the first thing a small business should consider is the problem it is trying to solve.
"The most important thing from Skytap's perspective is that the cloud really isn't just about infrastructure," Odell said. "It's about people solving problems. It should be about scalability, elasticity and economy."
He added, "What our small business customers are asking for is the ability to create virtual environments, run applications without code changes or rewrites and, most importantly, to be able to collaborate and share using a self-service Web interface."
Odell said anyone responsible for small business IT should ask a number of questions when considering a cloud services provider.
Most importantly, does the cloud provider allow you to run existing applications without any code rewrites or changes to code? This may be the most fundamental question of all. According to Microsoft's research, 27 percent of SMBs have already bought into cloud services because it integrates with existing technology. Another 36 percent of SMBs would be encouraged to buy into cloud services because it integrates with existing technology.
"Being able to migrate custom applications over to the cloud without rewrites is not only a huge cost saver but also a huge time saver for SMBs," Odell said.
Small business owners should also ask whether the cloud provider offer granular user access and user-based permissions based on roles. Can you measure value on a per user basis? Can you auto-suspend resources by setting parameters on usage to avoid overuse of the cloud?
The latter is especially important, he noted. While cloud services can lead to tremendous cost savings, their pay-as-you-go nature can lead to a massive bill if not used efficiently.
Odell also recommended paying special attention to the level of responsive support offered by a cloud provider.
"I think for SMBs it's really important," he said. "Having to log a Web form and then wait 24 to 48 hours for support can be really frustrating." Instead, he said, the provider should guarantee that a support team would respond within a few hours.
Waldo agreed, noting that a service-level agreement with a high-availability guarantee and 24-hour support is essential.
Anyway, now that we got a little better idea about Cloud Computing let us see what it does to us in the software industry. Here are a few thoughts:
IT Infrastructure will change dramatically. Some applications will shift to private clouds and others to public clouds. There may be a lot of optimization of resource usage.
Some IT jobs may vanish altogether. New skills will be in demand.
The way applications are developed, tested, deployed and continuously re-factored will undergo a change. What if every enterprise becomes like a Google in delivering incremental improvements constantly?
The selling and licensing of applications will change too. I wonder what happens to all those batch apps that run once a week or a month?
The way data is handled will undergo a major shift. Data driven applications will be will become a mainstream. Customer data, visitor data, partner data, behavioral data will provide more insights for businesses.
Business models will change. We have already seen some interesting shifts.
The architecture of applications will continue to evolve. The way apps store/retrieve data, the way they inter-connect with other apps on the cloud will change. Every app has the potential to become more intelligent and more adaptive since we will know how users use them.
Data volumes will skyrocket. This will cause a new class of skills to emerge. Facebook is talking about petabytes and zetabytes will become common. There are already jobs like Data Scientists, Data driven Journalists appearing on job boards. There will be pattern miners, data visualizers and machine learning will become mainstream and will get better with so much of training data. Google is already talking about “serendipity engine”. Data Analytics will become a core tool for every business.
Search will undergo change as well. As so much data sits in the cloud, a lot of it locked as the invisible web, we need a new class of search engines. “Exploration Engines” will become the dominant breed of search for private data.
Information Engines will start appearing – information discovery engines, filtering engines, semantic extraction engines, pattern detection engines will be the first generation.
New markets will be created. I can’t even hazard a guess on the innovations that will be enabled by this new computing infrastructure. Most of it will happen due to the unbelievable level of access to government and public data as well as social graphs, information streams, activity streams and real-time location data.
This is not even a comprehensive list. Each item in the list points to several opportunities. That is a topic for another post. www.woodappleunik.com
India has the highest rate of adoption for Mobile. And the adoption drove the big players in the local and international market to have their presence in the Indian Mobile Operators space. In a similar way you will soon see various service providers for Cloud Computing emerging and it is going to be the next big wave after the Mobile era.
If you take a deep look at the Cloud Computing technology, it is nothing but providing IT related resources such as computing, storage, Network, system security, application, platform as a service. These services are charged based on the usage. Usage-based pricing is not something new to us and our Mobile, Telephone, Internet and Electricity follows the same pricing model.
Scarcity of Resources
India as a country with a huge population base has never been given adequate resources to embrace innovation. The case is even worse if you are an individual who wants to gain access to the latest technologies for your research and development needs. Cloud Computing addresses this challenge to a great extent and provides access to the necessary IT resources to satisfy your IT needs in an affordable way.
Future
In today's world, new business opportunities heavily depend on their IT infrastructure availability. Cloud computing technology in India will dramatically change the way we compute.
Some of the obvious segments that can directly reap the benefits are listed below:
Schools, Colleges & Universities - Embrace R&D and provide access to the latest technologies at an affordable price.
New Innovative Business Firms - Start-ups need not invest for their IT infrastructure cost and consume as their business grows. In fact, you can run your business on the Cloud J with an office at home.
Long Tail Business Units - A small petty shop can use a CRM available on the Cloud to send SMS greetings to their customers.
Multimedia Content Providers - Multimedia digital content can be distributed to various consumers for a lower price.
Telco (Network Operators) - Becomes the Cloud Computing technology provider, We have already seen TATA Communications is investing heavily on IaaS business.
I am sure there are many more innovative segments that are going to be discovered and soon you will see that all your desktops, laptops are going to vanish and you will walk around with a lightweight device such as an iPhone or Sixth Sense (Pranav Mistry's innovation) and all your computing a storage will be outsourced to a Cloud Computing Provider.
Our country's network infrastructure could be slow it down, but we should soon be fine with the help of 3G adoption in the network space.
The economics of the cloud, the rise of the mobile workforce and the consumerization of IT are making the transformation to the cloud a foregone conclusion within enterprise IT. But not every company, organization or government agency is necessarily keeping up. Are you?
You need more than capacity and utilization metrics to demonstrate cloud computing's ROI to the business. Consider these eight metrics to create a score card of your current and future business and IT needs relating to cloud computing.
Cloud computing has been described as a technological change brought about by the convergence of a number of new and existing technologies. The promise of cloud computing is identified primarily by the following key technical characteristics:
• The ability to create the illusion of infinite capacity performance is the same if scaled for one or one hundred or one thousand users with consistent service-level characteristics.
• Abstraction of the infrastructure so applications are not locked into devices or locations.
• Pay-as-you-go usage of the IT service; you only pay for what you use, with no or minimal up-front investment costs. You typically just use the service through a connection and device.
• Service is on-demand and able to scale up and down with near instant availability. Typically, no forward planning forecast is required.
• Access to applications and information can be obtained from any access point.
But this is only half the story. These technical characteristics can also be found in many non-disruptive technology solutions. What sets the promise of cloud computing apart is that the rate of change, magnitude of cost reduction and specific technical performance impact that cloud computing can provide is not just incremental, but can give a five-to-ten times order of magnitude of improvement.
The following are business metrics that can help translate the indicators from the capacity-utilization curve to direct and indirect benefits to the business:
1. The speed and rate of change - Cost reduction and cost of adoption /de-adoption is faster in the cloud. Cloud computing creates additional cost transformation benefits by reducing delays in decision costs by adopting pre-built services and a faster rate of transition to new capabilities. This is a common goal for business improvement programs that are lacking resources and skills and that are time sensitive.
2. Total cost of ownership optimization - Users can select, design configure and run infrastructure and applications that are best suited for business needs. Traditionally this has often been decoupled when IT projects are handed off to production services. In cloud computing environments these are joined up.
3. Rapid provisioning - Resources are scaled up and down to follow business activity as it expands and grows or is redirected. Provisioning time compression can go from weeks to hours.
4. Increased margin and cost control - Revenue growth and cost control opportunities allow companies to pursue new customers and markets for business growth and service improvement.
5. Dynamic usage - Elastic provisioning and service management targets real end users and real business needs for functionality as the scope of users and services evolve seeking new solutions.
6. Risk and compliance improvement - Cloud computing green capabilities can be leveraged through shared services.
7. Enhanced capacity utilization - IT avoids over-and under-provisioning of IT services to improve smarter business services.
8. Access to business skills and capability improvement - Cloud computing enables access to new skills and solutions through cloud sourcing on demand solutions.
These measures define a new set of business indicators that can be sused to create a "score card" of your current and future operational business and IT service needs relating to cloud computing potential.
