On Thursday I presented at KANZ 2009 – the Korea, Australia and New Zealand Broadband summit – on the implications and opportunities of cloud computing. I’ve uploaded the slide deck onto SlideShare, and you can view it below.
The purpose of my speech was to expand on my thinking on the cloud continuum and outline what “the cloud” meant and what opportunities it could give to organisations and governments.
By way of introduction, I highlighted that Gartner have recently placed Cloud Computing at the “peak of inflated expectations” on their latest hype cycle for emerging technologies.
I won’t deny that there’s a lot of hype around cloud computing – but I don’t know if this is quite a fair representation. Cloud computing covers a spectrum – as I’ve tried to show in my continuum – and I’d argue that SaaS solutions are well into the slope of enlightenment / plateau of productivity. PaaS (Platform as a Service) on the other hand is probably about right where Gartner place it…
However, the good news is that with so much interest in cloud computing, now is a good time to be talking about it and hopefully providing some guidance. Onto the substance of my presentation…
The Implications of Cloud Computing
As I see it, some key implications of cloud computing are:
An implicit need for good connectivity – as more and more users move across to the cloud the need for pervasive broadband increases.
Direct competition is very difficult – the immense scale of the IaaS and PaaS offerings from Google, Microsoft, etc, make it unrealistic to compete head on. Traditional hosting providers have much to be afraid of.
Enterprise level offerings at a “pay as you go” rate – a one man organisation can get the same feature rich solution as a 10,000 seat organisation.
Time to market is significantly faster – both in terms of realising an initial solution and adding incremental functionality to an existing platform.
Infrastructure complexity is significantly reduced – the further to left of the cloud continuum the less you need to worry about infrastructure. The pains of enterprise-scale replication, disaster recovery and resilience become the provider’s problem.
A shift from capital expenditure to operational expenditure – cloud computing means that we are no longer digging into capital budgets. Instead we are paying for what we use, as we use it. This is going to mean some interesting shifts in internal accounting and accountability.
The Opportunities of Cloud Computing
Beside the normal benefits of cloud computing, there are also some interesting opportunities that cloud computing presents:
Change the focus of IT – leverage cloud computing to allow organisations to spend their IT dollar on value adding activities. It’s said that 60% to 80% of IT budgets are spent on maintaining the status quo. Cloud computing gives the opportunity to alter this by moving non-business-differentiating IT activities outside the organisation. The classic example of this is messaging and collaboration such as that provided by Google Apps.
Niche or country-specific offerings – given the difficulty of competing head-on against the big players in the field of IaaS & PaaS – the opportunity is instead there to look at where they can’t play. From a New Zealand perspective, an obvious opportunity is the development of a local “private cloud” for Government agencies.
International presence – a locally developed SaaS solution can more easily attain a global marketplace. A company can deploy its new SaaS solution from massive interational data centres using the power of the PaaS and IaaS offerings available there. This gives enterprise-level scale and resilience at a “dollars per hour” rate.
“Green IT” – there are opportunities in terms of reduced power consumption from having fewer physical servers running. Furthermore, the cloud gives your staff access from anywhere – increasing the ability for staff to avoid unnecessary travel and to telecommute.
I think the above list is really just a starter – if we really start thinking about where we can take cloud computing then the sky’s the limit. (hmmm…that’s a very bad pun).
