Showing posts with label On-demand. Show all posts
Showing posts with label On-demand. Show all posts

February 7, 2016

Cloud Pleasing

Technology vendors have wised-up and are rushing to the cloud to give customers what they want. 

You want cloud?  

You got cloud!

Cloud Computing with the virtually infinite promise for flexible, cost-effective, on-demand computing--all centrally managed by the vendor--you can sleep easy at night, oh baby. 

CIOs love it. 

The only problem as everyone moves to the cloud is the promise of the cloud continues to fall short

Now how unpopular a thing to say is that? 

Take out the guillotine...

Seriously though, it was supposed to be flexible, but it isn't so much as vendors contract with customers for multi-year deals and customers find switching vendors not quite so easy...anyone hear of vendor lock-in?

Also, cloud was supposed to be more cost-effective, but vendors still need to make their margins, so longer commitments, service bundling, minimum fixed costs, and variable month-to-month pricing--sure helps things add BIG DOLLARS for the cloud vendor. 

Then you have vendors that simply call everything cloud...ah, "cloud washing" that is.  If you think you are getting cloud (even if it ain't so much so), yippee are you happy...you have drunk the cool-aid and it is sweet.

Technology leaders swooping into a new job want to come in with a bang..."Hey, look what I did to modernize, transform, reinvent, revolutionize...and save money too--thank G-d, they hired me."

So cloud, cloud, cloud...it sounds so CLOUD PLEASING, I mean crowd-pleasing. 

Whether in the specific situation it's better or not, that's not the point, stupid. 

At least, it's out of our hair--let the vendor worry about it!

One, two, three...everyone say "CLOUD!" ;-)

(Source Graphic: Andy Blumenthal)
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September 3, 2009

Zipcar = Cloud Computing

No, not exactly. But they actually do have a lot in common in that they are both about sharing resources and using them to achieve cost-savings and flexibility.

An article in Fortune Magazine (September 14, 2009) on Zipcars really got me thinking about this.

With cloud computing, we are sharing our IT infrastructure, storage, and/or applications with others and using the services of cloud providers. It is one big virtual environment, where instead of everyone having their own technologies and applications, we make use of shared resources and we meet our information technology needs on demand and pay only for what we use.

Zipcars has the same-shared model as the cloud, and shifting toward this new paradigm is going to help preserve the environment.

Usage: Like cloud computing, Zipcars provides for the use of automobile when you need one and you pay by the hour or day, according to what you use. It’s flexible, saves money, and cuts down on the number of vehicles on the road and therefore on the pollution associated with them.

Cost: Both Zipcars and cloud computing cost pennies on the dollar. For a basic $50 membership and $11.25 an hour you can drive a Zipcar (note: drivers who give up their own cars save an average of $800 per month). For 12-25 cents per month you can store a gigabyte in the cloud or for 10 cents-$1.25 an hour you can process tasks on the Elastic Computer Cloud (EC2).

Functionality: Zipcars move people around and cloud computing moves data.

Centralization: Zipcars are co-located in “company created ‘pods’ or group of cars in parking lots or garages,” and cloud computing services are centralized in data centers of large cloud providers (like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and IBM)

Market: Zipcars has grown already to 325,000 members and is growing 30% a year with a overall market for shared vehicles expected to balloon to $800 million over the next five years (Fortune), and business IT spending on cloud computing is expected to rise from $16 billion last year to $42 billion by 2012 (IDC).

Users: Major companies (not just individuals) are using Zipcars—so far “about 8,500 companies have signed up, including Lockheed Martin, Gap, and Nike.” And brand name companies are signing up for cloud computing, such as NY Times, NASDAQ, Major League Baseball, ESPN, Hasbro and more. (http://www.johnmwillis.com/other/top-10-entperises-in-the-cloud/).

Going green: Each shared Zipcar “takes up to 20 cars off the road as members sell their rides or decide not to buy new ones.” Each move to cloud computing makes some or all of organizations unique servers, storage devices, and applications obsolete.

The trend: With the transportation market, the future will be “a blend of things like the Zipcar, public transportation, and private car ownership (according to Bill Ford), and with the IT industry, the future will be a combination of cloud computing, managed services, and in-house IT service provision.

Zipcars and cloud computing are benefiting from the new shared services model driven by cost-savings, flexibility, efficiencies of allotment, and eco-consciousness. These are driving change in our usage of transportation and computing for the better.


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June 26, 2009

The Cloud is a Natural Evolution of IT


Cloud computing is bringing us closer than ever to providing IT as utility, where users no longer need to know or care about how the IT services are provided, and only want to know that they are reliably there—just like turning on the light.
This rent-an-IT model of cloud computing can apply to any portion of an organization’s IT architecture, as follows:
  • Service architecture—for application systems, there is “software as a service” (SaaS) such as Google Apps suite for office-productivity or Salesforce.com for customer relationship management. And for developing those systems, there is “platform as a service” (PaaS) such as Google Apps Engine (GAE) or the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) Rapid Access Computing Environment (RACE).
  • Information architecture—for storing the data used in systems, there is “storage as a service” such as Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3).
  • Technology architecture—for hosting systems, there is “infrastructure as a service” such as Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
The big advantage to using hosted IT or cloud computing is that it provides on-demand information technology—again like your electricity usage; the juice is there when you need it. Additionally, by outsourcing to specialist IT providers, you can generally get more efficiency, economy, and agility in providing IT your organization.
Of course, there are challenges that include ownership, security, privacy, and a cultural shift from a vertical (stovepiped) to horizontal (enterprise and common services) mindset.
From my perspective, cloud computing is a natural evolution in our IT service provision:
  1. At first, we did everything in-house, ourselves—with our own employees, equipment, and facilities. This was generally very expensive in terms of finding and maintaining employees with the right skill sets, and developing and maintaining all our own systems and technology infrastructure, securing it, patching it, upgrading it, and so on.
  2. So then came, the hiring of contractors to support our in-house staff; this helped alleviate some of the hiring and training issues on the organization. But it wasn’t enough to make us cost-efficient, especially since we were still managing all our own systems and technologies for our organization as a stovepipe.
  3. Next, we moved to a managed services model, where we out-sourced vast chunks of our IT—from our helpdesk to desktop support, from data centers to applications development, and even to security and more. But apparently that didn’t go far enough, because we were still buying, building, and maintaining our own IT instances for our organization, but now employing call centers and data centers in far-flung places.
  4. And finally, the realization has emerged that we do not need to provide IT services either with our own or contracted staff, but rather we can rely on IT cloud providers who will manage our information technology and that of tens, hundreds, and thousands of others and provide it seamlessly over the Internet, so that we all benefit from a more scalable and unified service provision model.
The cloud computing model takes the CIO/CTO and their staffs out of the fire-fighting mode of IT management and into the drivers seat for managing IT strategically, innovatively, and with a focus on the specific mission needs of their organization.

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