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According to Romak Stanek big server vendors like HP, Sun, Dell and Microsoft will be the big losers as services evolve to the clouds. I agree with this thinking expect for the inclusion of Microsoft. The Microsoft folks are busy transitioning their software and licensing model to cloud-based services. And many customers living in infrastructure clouds will still want to utilize a windows operating system.
If you’ve been in IT long enough you probably remember the famous motto stated by Sun CEO Scott McNealy in the 90′s: “The network is the computer”. McNealy’s promise was a decade ahead of its time. I think it is safe to say that today the network is a big part of the computer. But is the network ready to fully supplant our local computing devices? Despite recent proclamations that “everything is a service” I believe that technologies such as cloud computing have a long way to grow before replacing traditional computing architectures.
A number of trends are pushing the development of cloud computing:
– Consumer technology innovation is pushing business technology innovation
– Businesses are adopting collaboration and team-oriented work methodologies
– Cloud computing is driving down CapEX and OpEx for businesses
– Barriers to entry such as connectivity, reliability, and security are decreasing
These trends are great for small businesses and start-up companies. But I believe that cloud computing faces a number of adoption challenges in medium and large enterprises. Here are just a few:
No standards. All the big guys (Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc…) are building out cloud computing platforms today. The problem is that all of these application publishing platforms are different. I can easily move my Windows applications from a local Dell server to a local HP server. I can’t move my application from Google’s cloud to Amazon’s cloud. I can’t see enterprises betting the farm on a single cloud computing platform.
Legacy code. Large enterprises are running legacy code written decades ago. Cloud computing does not offer the cost savings to justify a rewrite of these legacy applications yet.
Performance. A cloud storage technology like Amazon’s S3 will not come close to matching the performance of local storage resources like a NetApp SAN in the foreseeable future. The use of cloud storage is limited to applications with low performance requirements.
Security. Cloud computing and storage vendors will have a tough time convincing large enterprises (and their auditors) that data is securely managed in their cloud infrastructure. I work with businesses every week that dismiss shared computing architectures in favor of dedicated computing resources. Until businesses are comfortable “crossing the streams” we won’t see large adoption of cloud computing by enterprises.
