Stories by Bernard Golden

At some point the economic unviability of private clouds will become clear. Math will win out.

IT as we know it is on the brink of massive disruption. Enterprise IT groups will struggle to rebalance skills while vendors struggle for survival. How will your organization fare in the new cloud-centric world?

Cloud computing is remaking the entire IT stack, from the foundation to the customer level. The application layer is no different.

It’s a software-driven, open source world, and we’re just living in it.

When large IT organizations embrace open source software, good things can happen. And with any kind of shift in methodology, there are obstacles to overcome. When it comes to adopting open source, though, enterprises may longer have a choice.

CIO.com’s Bernard Golden looks into the near future of cloud computing. Here’s what he sees.

While it seems the IT world is rushing to embrace the concept of DevOps, not everyone agrees on what it actually means. Pivoting toward something that’s still a bit fuzzy might sound alarms in your organization, but you might not be able to afford to wait to implement this development practice.

You think mobile’s big? Just wait until the Internet of Things transforms everything around us, from milk cartons to highway overpasses.

Amazon Web Services’ signature conference continues to show how customers both large and small are solving their real IT challenges, which is one of the reasons it’s evolved into a must-attend conference.

In Part 2 of his series on Innovation and the Cloud, writer Bernard Golden looks at how the ability to detect events by parsing information organized by location rather than individuals could be a game changer for any number of different industries.

Proponents of cloud computing often insist that one of its biggest benefits is not decreased costs, but greater agility. To them, obtaining infrastructure in minutes rather than months is a game-changer. Of course, as I noted in a column last year, viewing lower costs and increased agility as separate cloud characteristics is incorrect; instead, lower costs and greater agility are, so to speak, two sides of the same coin.

Last week, blogger Aidan Finn posted an excerpt from a Microsoft email announcing 13 percent price hikes in the European region. Reaction from the trade press was immediate, predicting that this action presaged ongoing price hikes.

It's easy to despair about the cloud computing industry and its seemingly endless navel-gazing. It often seems that the cloud crowd is more interested in internecine warfare than actually helping customers realize the benefits of this emerging platform. The prime example of this tech narcissism is the ongoing industry slugfest regarding private/public/hybrid cloud and what the "right" solution is.

In 1865, the English economist William Stanley Jevons published The Coal Question, a book with a prosaic title that contained profound implications. Jevons set out to establish the size of England's coal reserves, a critical question for industrial and naval power. During his research, he stumbled upon a curious paradox: As coal use became more efficient due to the advent of better quality steam engines, coal consumption rose rather than fell.

I just finished attending two conferences: the Cloud Foundry Summit and the OpenStack Summit. Both were hives of activity, with attendance well up on the previous event. Most striking to me was the significant presence of large enterprise IT decision-makers -- architects, directors of applications and operations, and even a sprinkling of CIOs.