It is not exactly a news flash that cloud computing is taking the world by storm; individuals, businesses and governments are all starting to embrace the cloud for its efficiency, mobility, ease of use and cost savings, among other reasons. But where that leads us is still unsure.
“Those of us who have been following technology developments for the past few decades realize that, with rare exceptions, things hardly ever work out as planned,” wrote Arthur Cole recently for IT Business Edge.
“The cloud is still an unknown quantity in enterprise circles,” he noted. “People are pretty sure they want it, but they have yet to fully understand how to make proper use of it.”
We’re still in early days, with most of the growth in cloud use coming from firms such as Google and Amazon. Most businesses and industries have not yet truly tapped into the cloud on an industry-specific level, and that’s bound to take the world in a different place than what we’re seeing today.
Right now, most firms have begun to embrace the cloud, but only with peripheral systems.
“It is clear that virtually everyone sees the cloud as a significantly transformative development. When you get down to it, however, transformation is difficult, which is why most organizations are using the technology for peripheral applications like email and office productivity rather than those that impact core business functions,” noted Cole.
Simple ROI calculations are partially responsible.
“The more difficult it is to switch to the cloud, the worse the cost/benefit ratio becomes, which means apps that have a long list of established relationships with legacy infrastructure will probably be the last to go.”
This is the early phase of cloud adoption, the phase fueled by a few applications and a lot of experimentation and proving of the value proposition. But when business fully embraces the cloud, we will likely see many applications and use cases that have not even been imagined.
Some industries have already started making the transition. Key verticals such as banking and healthcare are starting to get industry-specific, highly-targeted cloud solutions. More are to come.
The Cloud Ethernet Forum, for instance, is working hard to help overcome the challenges of integrating disparate cloud architectures with each other and with legacy data infrastructure to enable better cloud use. It stresses that the next generation cloud environment must focus on, automation, security, programmability and analytics if it is to fully capture business use
“That knowledge will come with time and experience, and it will probably lead to a wide variety of cloud configurations and implementations—one for each and every enterprise on the planet,” surmised Cole.
We’re just getting started.
Edited by
Cassandra Tucker
