The not so disruptive nature of the cloud - Centralized vs. Democratized

So, as the title of this post suggests, I want to discuss the disruptive nature of the Cloud, or rather the cloud not being so disruptive at all. This will be a series of 5 posts in total, you're reading the fourth post.

Read about the cloud and what it means and you're bound to read that the introduction of the Cloud, the real Cloud, the one that meets all criteria for being a Cloud, has been disruptive.

I like the NIST definition of Cloud, it is quite comprehensive and less vendor-biased than Gartner's defintion.

The Cloud has been disruptive when it comes to the IT industry, especially the hosting market. But it has also been a force in how we handle IT within the enterprise. There are a few important aspects of IT in the enterprise that we consider to have changed due to the Cloud:

Moving from in-house IT management services to off-site IT management services. 

Moving from CAPEX (Capital Expenses) based IT investments to OPEX (Operating Expenses). 

Moving from on-premise (business) applications to off-premise (hosted) applications. 

Moving from a centralized IT to a democratized IT 

I'm sure you can think of other movements as well in your IT environment, but these are typically considered to be not only happening, but also to be disruptive within the enterprise.

These are in fact not really changes happening due to the Cloud, the Cloud merely gave these movements a boost and fast-tracked the changes in IT.

Last time, which was a while ago, I wrote about the location of the data center, or rather about where the IT Infrastructure was located. This time around I want to discuss how IT resources find their way to the user, the customer.

Ever since the beginning of (business) usage of IT within the enterprise there has been a movement from either centralized governance towards decentralized or even democratized and back. But first let me explain what I mean by 'democratized'. It is actually quite simple. Democratized means that everybody and their mother can obtain or have access to IT resources in this case. Consider computers, storage, network access and software applications.
In the era of mainframes, IT was centralized, with the advent of PC's it got democratized, with client/server architectures it moved back to centralized and with the advent of thin clients, it became even more centralized. But the key here is that we've been at a democratized IT situation a long time ago, when PC's were introduced and software was installed locally on the PC by either a support engineer or the user herself. As long as you could get hold of the installation disks (and of course a valid license) you could install whatever you wanted. This was very beneficiary for the agility of the user but very bad for cost control on IT support expenditure. Because with all that software installed, viruses got installed as well, rendering the PC's unusable and a support engineer had to come over and fix the problem.
Another important problem with a decentralized and especially a democratized situation with respect to the IT environment is collaboration between users. Apart from the fact that there is in principle no common ground for data, or information exchange if you will, but the diversity of applications in use, similar applications at that, means that exchanging information, actually collaborating is cumbersome to say the least. This resulted in a move towards centralization where PC's are not much more than computers that allow for a user friendly interface on top of a centralized application.

With the advent of the cloud, and specifically SaaS offerings, the model became intrinsically more centralized, but at the same time, because of the public nature of SaaS offerings, they also became available for anybody with a means to pay for the service, thus democratization entered the enterprise again. With IaaS, but more over with PaaS, the democratization of IT resources extended to not just (business) applications but also towards computing resources and storage. Both Amazon and Microsoft have a ton of additional services on top of their own platforms, provided by both themselves and third parties.
Everybody with a credit card can get their own enterprise software running in the cloud, create their own development environments or deploy a new marketing website. Typically with better availability promises than their internal IT departments can offer.

Is this a new way of working, is democratization a new way for enterprises to handle IT? Hardly. So once again, there's nothing disruptive here that is related to the cloud.

So, why is the cloud really taking off? Why hasn't the hype died yet? Why is the cloud causing IT departments such headaches? In the next, fifth and last installment of this series, I will reveal the true disruptive nature of the cloud. Stay tuned.

The not so disruptive nature of the Cloud - From On-Premise to Off-Premise

 So, as the title of this post suggests, I want to discuss the disruptive nature of the Cloud, or rather the cloud not being so disruptive at all. This will be a series of 5 posts in total, you're reading the third post.

Read about the cloud and what it means and you're bound to read that the introduction of the Cloud, the real Cloud, the one that meets all criteria for being a Cloud, has been disruptive.

I like the NIST definition of Cloud, it is quite comprehensive and less vendor-biased than Gartner's defintion.

The Cloud has been disruptive when it comes to the IT industry, especially the hosting market. But it has also been a force in how we handle IT within the enterprise. There are a few important aspects of IT in the enterprise that we consider to have changed due to the Cloud:

Moving from in-house IT management services to off-site IT management services. 

Moving from CAPEX (Capital Expenses) based IT investments to OPEX (Operating Expenses). 

Moving from on-premise (business) applications to off-premise (hosted) applications. 

Moving from a centralized IT to a democratized IT 

I'm sure you can think of other movements as well in your IT environment, but these are typically considered to be not only happening, but also to be disruptive within the enterprise.
These are in fact not really changes happening due to the Cloud, the Cloud merely gave these movements a boost and fast-tracked the changes in IT.

Last time I wrote about the non-disruptiness of the Cloud in terms of finances, CAPEX vs. OPEX, this time around I will discuss the location of your (business) applications.

Of course with the advent of the Cloud, we're no longer hosting our applications in our own data centers, which may or not be operated by a third party, the hosting provider but instead we host our applications with a Cloud provider in the form of Software as a Service (SaaS). The posterboy of SaaS is most likely Salesforce.com. Talk with anybody about SaaS and ask for a typical example of SaaS and they're likely to mention Salesforce.com. Read any article about SaaS and the article is bound to mention the same.

So what is SaaS? Well, something SaaS is not, is disruptive. But there's a lot out there in the world that is not disruptive. SaaS is the situation where you buy the right to use a particular piece of software that is hosted by a third party, the SaaS provider, and you're not the only one using the software. Ideally you're only aware of other customers using the same software because you understand the concept of SaaS and not because they're messing up your 'copy' of the software.
The NIST has an interesting definition of SaaS, which from a SaaS customer point of view is particularly interesting when it comes to the last part of the definition, where it discusses the level of control the customer has, namely no control other than some limited configuration capabilities.

Of course we all know about email services like GMail, Hotmail, YahooMail, or your ISP's webmail solution. And although this is SaaS, this is only since the introduction of SaaS as terminology a real alternative for on-premise email capabilities for enterprises.

This is nothing new to those that have been using the numerous ASP (Application Service Provider) solutions out in the market. The difference with SaaS is in the Cloud. Where the ASP was hosted on-premise with the ASP vendor, the SaaS is hosted in the Cloud, allowing it to be used in massive scale, and because of the sheer unlimited resources, it allows for extremely diverse applications.

The move from on-premise to off-premise as a Cloud aspect for enterprises is hardly disruptive, it's something that's been happening even before there was a Cloud and embraced by the business long before the IT embraced or even grasped the concept.

The most evident different between ASP and SaaS is the extremely standardized contracts of SaaS offerings if there is a contract at all. Where as with ASP a separate contract was closed between provider and consumer, allowing for some tailoring, with SaaS this is not so much the case. Contracts are standard and with a mere credit card you can sign up. No long term contracts, but pay as you go.

Next time another undisruptive aspect of the Cloud.

 So, as the title of this post suggests, I want to discuss the disruptive nature of the Cloud, or rather the cloud not being so disruptive at all. This will be a series of 5 posts in total, you're reading the first post.<br><br> Read about the cloud and what it means and you're bound to read that the introduction of the Cloud, the real Cloud, the one that meets all criteria for being a Cloud, has been disruptive.<br><br> I like the <a href="http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistpubs/800-145/SP800-145.pdf">NIST definition</a> of Cloud, it is quite comprehensive and less vendor-biased than <a href="http://www.gartner.com/it-glossary/cloud-computing/">Gartner's defintion</a>.<br><br> The Cloud has been disruptive when it comes to the IT industry, especially the hosting market. But it has also been a force in how we handle IT within the enterprise. There are a few important aspects of IT in the enterprise that we consider to have changed due to the Cloud:<br><ul> <li>Moving from in-house IT management services to off-site IT management services. </li> <li>Moving from CAPEX (Capital Expenses) based IT investments to OPEX (Operating Expenses). </li> <li>Moving from on-premise (business) applications to off-premise (hosted) applications. </li> <li>Moving from a centralized IT to a democratized IT </li> </ul> I'm sure you can think of other movements as well in your IT environment, but these are typically considered to be not only happening, but also to be disruptive within the enterprise.<br> These are in fact not really changes happening due to the Cloud, the Cloud merely gave these movements a boost and fast-tracked the changes in IT.<br></div> </div>

The not so disruptive nature of the Cloud - CAPEX vs. OPEX

So, as the title of this post suggests, I want to discuss the disruptive nature of the Cloud, or rather the cloud not being so disruptive at all. This will be a series of 5 posts in total, you're reading the second post.

Read about the cloud and what it means and you're bound to read that the introduction of the Cloud, the real Cloud, the one that meets all criteria for being a Cloud, has been disruptive.

I like the NIST definition of Cloud, it is quite comprehensive and less vendor-biased than Gartner's defintion.

The Cloud has been disruptive when it comes to the IT industry, especially the hosting market. But it has also been a force in how we handle IT within the enterprise. There are a few important aspects of IT in the enterprise that we consider to have changed due to the Cloud:

Moving from in-house IT management services to off-site IT management services. 

Moving from CAPEX (Capital Expenses) based IT investments to OPEX (Operating Expenses). 

Moving from on-premise (business) applications to off-premise (hosted) applications. 

Moving from a centralized IT to a democratized IT 

I'm sure you can think of other movements as well in your IT environment, but these are typically considered to be not only happening, but also to be disruptive within the enterprise.
These are in fact not really changes happening due to the Cloud, the Cloud merely gave these movements a boost and fast-tracked the changes in IT.

Last time I wrote about Cloudsourcing, this time the more financial part is the topic.

Ask the various vendors as well as analysts about the consequences of moving from the traditional data center model to the Cloud and they're bound to mention the big change that will happen regarding to your costs, namely going from CAPEX to OPEX based expenditure. Something that is to many a huge step in corporate financing.
My question here is: "Really?" In the 1990's there was already some form of Cloud, but at the time it was marketed as Utility Computing. The idea was that you would buy computing power just like you buy electricity, as a utility. Sun Microsystems was betting on this as were many other vendors.

Basically, in its essence, this is what Cloud is to a large part about. But the monniker 'Utility Computing' was dropped and after some iterations and the fact that the Internet is always portrayed as a cloud in diagrams, the new name was born. Fact is that by coining 'Utility Computing' these vendors addressed the accountants in the enterprises they were talking to, explaining the cost model. Why? Because the model of basic utilities was very well known to the people from the more financially inclined departments. They were used to thinking in terms of closing a contract and than pay for whatever utility they were using as they went. Pay-per-use. This definitely was and is true for a lot of IT related costs especially in the data center like power consumption, cooling (Air Conditioning).

So the disruptive nature of the Cloud on the financials of an enterprise are not that disruptive at all, in fact at the time of introduction of the Cloud in its very early stages the Cloud vendors tried not to be disruptive at all and instead conform to what those with the money already knew.