Time for a lunch time blog entry…
Information Management put together some cloud predictions for the cloud industry. Here’s my 2 cents for the key points I picked out.
- You will build a private cloud, and it will fail. < Thank goodness. Get rid of the whole premise, it’s kind of stupid. The basis of cloud computing is the almost endless backing of massive funding for massive amounts of systems. Throw into that mix massively distributed, geographically dispersed locations where the machines are located. A little contraption in a box thing called “cloud” is bullshit. Plain and simple, don’t delude yourself.
- Hosted private clouds will outnumber internal clouds 3:1. <Good. The internal clouds – see above comment.
- Community clouds will arrive, thanks to compliance. <Awesome! This is when laws, rights, and other ideals will seriously come to play within the cloud computing space. Community clouds will have to be transparent in ways that AWS, Rackspace, Windows Azure, and others will never be. They might not be as robust or feature rich, but it will enable communities and others to utilize the cloud with known rights, liberties, and other notions that aren’t up for debate as they are with the other cloud providers (re: Wikileaks & such)
- The BI gap will widen. < BI is PERFECT for the cloud. BI on current system on relational databases without thinking about NoSQL, Big Data, and other notions is a major problem. BI will begin migrations to utilizing the cloud or BI will just die and another cloud related acronym will most likely come to replace it. Real time Business Intelligence is much more readily available with cloud resources than attempting to implement real time business intelligence on-premises.
- Cloud standards still won’t be here – get over it. < I agree. I’m over it, and I’m not even remotely worried about it. Maybe it is because I’m a software developer and I lean heavily on well designed, solid architecture, loosely coupled, SOLID ideals, and other things that would allow me to prevent lock in at multiple levels of usage. In addition, I know what is what within the cloud, I don’t need some arbitrary standard since the obvious usage patterns are already pretty visible in the cloud community already.
- Cloud security will be proven, but not by the providers alone. < Cloud security is indeed a shared responsibility. If one is in the cloud industry though and is still talking about the “cloud being secure”, they’ve not been paying attention. The security concerns are much less with cloud computing than most on-premises computing. The biggest security concerns, at the actual software level, are still the same. These responsibilities are shared, but rest heavily on the shoulders of software developers, architects, and in the same places a company (or Government entity) has previously needed to be concerned with.
Overall I’d love to see two things for the cloud community.
- Stop accepting the “Security is a Concern because I’m scared and haven’t been paying attention” and just start implementing. The reason being is those same people that are kicking and dragging their feet into the future will keep kicking and dragging their feet. Eventually they’ll either be unemployed or update their skill sets and legacy ideas and step into the future. They’ll be a contributing part of the community and we can all smile and be happy then!
- More significant penetration needs to be made into the Enterprise IT Environments. I know, some people won’t be needed anymore, but others will be needed for the new applications, tooling, and things that one can do by not wasting resources on physical boxes, excess IT costs, and other now unneeded IT impediments. IT and business itself needs to realize this, the sooner the better. The companies that realize this sooner will be able to make significant strategic headway over their competitors. Those companies that never realize this will most likely wither and be dead within 2-3 years of mass adoption of the cloud options. Simply, “skate or die”.