Cloud Computing - Opinion

tkerber

There may already be a thread regarding this, but I haven't seen it. I'd just like opinions from a bunch of other IT professionals on what you think it means and how it will impact the market. The word has been around for a couple of years now but the only businesses I've seen heavily using cloud technologies are small businesses with little to no IT staff.

I'd like to see what others think - whether it's a complete game changer that will take over all industries, a marketing fad, or somewhere in between.

Here is a video to throw in for the marketing aspect - What is Cloud Computing? - YouTube

arrogantbastard

It's not new, it's been around a while. It's also not going anywhere anytime soon. "Cloud" solutions are used by companies of all sizes for various purposes, it's not a one trick pony that's just used for one specific purpose.

UnixGuy

As IT professionals, it's smart to learn what's new and hot in the market so we stay employable and move up. It's not a one size fit all that's for sure, but the decision is always made by management so we better be prepared anyway. I think Cloud has its place and it's here to stay.

NightShade03

I think that any organization wanting to get ahead or be innovative will leverage the cloud. It has too many benefits for companies not to take advantage. The challenge will be legacy orgs that can't adapt to change buying out these innovative companies and then having no way to marry them to the traditional enterprise. The M&A will fail and a once successful business will go under.

DevilWAH

The cloud is such a encompassing term that it makes no sense to really talk about it likes it a single technology. it ranges from gmail and drop box, to fully vertulised data centres with servers, switches, routers and security devices. there are huge benefits and big pitfalls for getting it wrong.

take for example a situation like ours where our data must reside with in the UK.. well in this case Google drive would not work as you can't grantee where the data will be. Or if you take to google and pay the right money you can limit which of there data centers your data will be on. Or for a small office company, running office 365 is cost effective and removes the need for skilled technical staff on site. On the other hand a company with 150,000 users might find in house email and file shares work better.

Lots of people will raise the security card and "not letting my data in to the hands of corporate cloud where it will be mind by the government", but to be honest there are ways to mitigate this, and big cloud business have it in there best intrest to keep your data safe if they want to stay in business. but security is only one of the many questions you need to answer before you embrace it.

Cloud is great, and offers a lot of benefits, think how useful it is to have contacts synced across multiply devices, like on personal phones. Or able to reach data in a standardised way from any place or device. The cloud has been around for decades, its just finally internet speeds have caught up enough to mean its usable. I would not drop in house and move to cloud over night. But I think the next 5-10 years will see a steady progression of more and more services migrated to it.

powmia

Cloud is about economies of scale. It turns resources into commodities. Instead of providing facilities, equipment, and staff to provide your own compute and storage... you simply pay for compute, storage, and a more specific staff (obviously you're fitting the bill for the underlying infrastructure... but... economies of scale).

It isn't only small companies utilizing the cloud. Guess who's websites are hosted in Amazon Web Services... Amazon.com itself, and Netflix... amongst thousands of others. It isn't going anywhere, and is only going to continue to grow exponentially.

It's easy to avoid the topic and live a happy life knowing that the world will always need people to build and maintain infrastructure, until your CTO decides that your organization should utilize the cloud... at that point you're watching youtube videos to learn how to setup a network in the cloud... or sending your resume to cloud providers to keep working on the infrastructure. At least be familiar.

docrice

One of the main benefits of using cloud services is not having to manage the infrastructure behind the technology you're using it for. Businesses are often hesitant to invest in vertical domains with expert staff, software, hardware, support, licensing, and other capex/opex when it doesn't return an obvious advantage to the bottom line. There are risks like anything else and from a security perspective not all clouds are created equal. You have to vet them just like anything else, although instead of evaluating them like you would appliances or software suites, you have to look at their operational maturity and other concerns in addition to feature sets, usability, business workflow integration, and pricing.

In many cases, cloud offerings do not replace traditional infrastructure but rather complements them.

Another main driver for using cloud-based services is potentially enabling speed and agility for your business. With the right fit, you don't have to worry about upgrades and rolling those sort of changes out across your enterprise if someone else is going to take care of that back-end. That said, there are challenges for multi-tenant providers to scale and maintain minimal downtime for their own changes, but that just goes with the territory.

Sometimes traditional enterprise solutions provide better functional granularity, but it typically comes at a cost or additional complexity to manage.