It is the wave of the future.
All the fascination with terminal hardware applications will be over in the near future. The “cloud” and SAS will shake up the world of hardware and software and make technology more accessible to large populations. Devices to do so will cost pennies on today’s dollar or be free.
Like PC manufacturers, the sun is already setting on mobile phone devices, associated applications, OTS packaged software and related products. Although these products are currently popular, they are expensive and will quickly be outpaced by stiff economic and service competition.
Smart and strategic planners are pointing to the future and it is not a market for licensed hardware and software: it is geared towards services with low cost access and fees. Volume, free products, advertising and shareware will drive everything.
Possible exceptions for a slightly longer period of time are high-end hardware and software technologies in government contracting, which for security reasons need to be cloistered, protected and safeguarded. Your friendly government agency will be the last to take your PC out of the window.
The importance of cloud computing to *any* business, new or not, depends entirely on the business itself, its needs and goals, and its policies and strategies. It is far from certain that all companies need cloud services.
“Cloud” technologies are sorely misunderstood, sorely misrepresented, and misunderstood even among those who work in IT: Among the topics now misrepresented are
a]there is no such thing as “the cloud”: there are many different implementations of cloud-like systems and services; each offers different levels and types of service. Some are completely private, some are completely public; and others are a mixture of the two. Some clouds are entirely on-premises; some clouds are remote and others may be a mixture of the two. There is no “one size fits all” cloud implementation. There is no cloud. There are simply collections of distributed services that are *described* as a cloud, or as something or other as a service.
b]Moving to a cloud deployment is not significantly different than deploying any other fail-safe, highly resilient technology deployment. The difference is that one has moved the complexity further out of one’s direct control and increased fragility and number of dependencies unless a proper risk and impact analysis has been performed prior to the design/implementation phase. , and has been carried out with the appropriate standards of due. diligence.
c]cost reduction is largely an illusion; we may see our capex/opex costs reduced, but in the meantime, the energy costs and carbon footprints of the global cloud and data storage industry and all of its NOCs have skyrocketed so that they now significantly exceed those of air traffic worldwide and are well on track to surpass those of air and ground transport combined by around 2020. The cloud doesn’t reduce those broader social and environmental “costs,” it just moves them somewhere else, off the grid. our view, leaving “us” with the illusion that we have reduced our capex/opex.
d]moving to a cloud deployment is all very well, but it increases a critical risk that has been with us since the dawn of the internet; the connection limit: the amount of data that can be moved between locations in a given period of time. now we are creating [and using] data at a speed that far exceeds our ability to move it.
We are also creating a gigantic single point of failure for all companies that become totally dependent on the cloud; if all your communications fail, so does the business. If your data movement time exceeds your risk recovery window, then the business fails.
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Cloud technology can be very useful; but only when all parties involved truly understand their risks and rewards. Startups need to make informed decisions when determining how critical a cloud implementation may be. [or may not] be for them Appearances are often deceptive.