Walk, Don't Run to the Cloud

For business organizations small and large, developing and maintaining a functional and scalable computing infrastructure can be a costly and labor intensive endeavor.

The latest panacea to sweep the IT industry is nebulously referred to as “Cloud” computing services, and has left companies both large and small struggling to find a way to leverage this hot new technology.

Traditionally, IT managers and planners are resistant to change, preferring battle tested solutions and directly managed infrastructures. This attitude is not without merit, as any company that has suffered a mission critical technology failure can attest to.

Integrating a whole new approach to the design and implementation of network and computer services will require technology managers to relinquish many of their preconceived notions of technology delivery. They must learn to accept a shift away from managing hardware themselves, and towards managing the services and feature sets they deliver.

Getting to the Cloud

It’s certainly true that the notion of an on-demand, flexible computing structure offers a means by which any company can achieve agility in the technology sector, but the reality is that adoption of the technology is likely to be far slower than the media would have you believe.

Confusion over implementation, service availability and regulatory compliance requirements are introducing hurdles into the process that for now, many companies don’t seem to want to tackle. As a comparison, virtualization technology, which forms the basis of cloud rollouts, is already widely deployed in the IT world.

Gartner Research indicates that by 2012, as much as 48% of installed applications will be running in a VM. This widespread adoption would seem to lend itself well to the migration to cloud services, given the similarities of the two concepts, but it may prove to be a significant stumbling block in itself. Companies who have invested their IT budgets into building their own virtualized infrastructure may be hesitant to readily tackle a whole new migration just yet, instead preferring to maximize their recent investments before moving on to the next big leap.