So the bigger issue is whether the benefits of cloud computing are significant enough to outweigh the current shortcomings-and remember, the evaluation must take into account the shortcomings of the current solution as well. The enthusiasm shown for cloud computing indicates that people are tired of what's in place today. Storage requirements are exploding. Despite the march of Moore's Law, it seems just as much is spent on hardware as ever-because more and more compute power is required as processing needs and application sprawl increases. The scale and density of networks constantly grows. And managing all the complexity is ever more challenging. As one friend of mine puts it: every year you need 35 percent more servers to meet processing requirements, but the population of people interested in working as sys admins stays pretty much flat. This is not a recipe for long-term data center success. That explains why cloud computing has so quickly fired people's imaginations.
Certainly it appears that many players in the IT industry are convinced of cloud computing's benefits. Major vendors like IBM, HP, and Microsoft are poised to invest billions of dollars in it. That says that they've made their assessments and concluded this represents-if not the future-at the very least a significant portion of the future.
Does that mean the issues people bring up with regard to cloud computing don't exist or are irrelevant? Not at all. Every one of them is valid to some degree-but none of them is absolute. And measured against the positive outcomes of the technology, each of them will be addressed or tolerated. To offer one example of how this will look going forward, when queried about the security of cloud computing at the recent IBM/Juniper announcement, Juniper Infrastructure Products Senior VP Manoj Leelanivas responded "Throughout my career, I've seen that when security and productivity come into conflict, productivity always prevails." In other words, the industry will embrace cloud computing despite its drawbacks.
The prudent course of action, therefore, is to acknowledge the issues present in cloud computing and still press ahead, identifying scenarios where it can be applied to achieve maximum payoff with minimum risk. Noting problems and using them as a reason for inaction is not a winning program in today's world. Standing pat means being left behind.
Join the CIO Australia group on LinkedIn. The group is open to CIOs, IT Directors, COOs, CTOs and senior IT managers.