Unlike children, it is generally considered a good thing when technology is ‘disruptive’ because, in theory, it has improved a product or service in ways the market did not expect.
While it is largely recognised that Cloud Computing is not intrinsically disruptive as it leverages existing technologies, it does offer a new, more efficient framework for the delivery of IT services. As such the Cloud may be the most efficient enabler for disruption the IT world has seen.
The use of Cloud Computing - either public or private - enables greater innovation through collaboration and rapid deployment, while offering dramatically lower costs. In addition, many future innovations will integrate innovative application and information services from third parties, including suppliers, customers, business partners and government agencies, that, in turn, may be offered as Cloud-based services.
Simply put, cloud computing has the potential to turn the economics of enterprise IT upside down, offering key business advantages from a capital- and operations-related expense perspective. The ability to collect resources, virtualise them, then dynamically provision from the new resource pool yields a much higher utilisation rate and, thus, better economics – sometimes up to 90 per cent utilisation, according to IBM research.
Additionally, standardisation and automation in the Cloud greatly reduce the overhead costs required to deliver IT services. By focusing on a few common IT configurations, including software stacks, storage allocations and application options, then automating the provisioning of these configurations, the amount of labour required to deliver that service is greatly reduced.
It is also true that the more usable and approachable IT becomes, the more it can be leveraged for new ideas and innovations. Cloud Computing provides enterprises with a two-fold solution: from an organisational perspective, the Cloud delivers services for consumer and business needs in a simplified way, providing the unbounded scale and high quality of service that drives the potential for growth and innovation.
From an end user perspective, Cloud Computing is a quick and easy way to acquire computing services without having to fully grasp and understand the underlying technology. It's an effective service acquisition and delivery model for IT resources and, if properly implemented within an overall technology strategy, can help improve overall business performance while controlling the costs of distributing IT resources to the organisation.
Beyond this, Cloud Computing has the potential to completely transform and link entire industries. It can connect millions of end-user devices, such as sensors and storage, to powerful back-end systems that can make sense of all this information in seconds. Every industry would be different if infrastructures were more connected, and trends and issues could be predicted in advance.
While this may sound like an exaggeration, it's not. It's networked, backed by extremely powerful systems, highly elastic, instantly available via the Internet and grounded in open standards so clouds can talk to each other. As analyst firm Gartner noted in its "Predictions 2009: Emerging Tech Markets" report, "Cloud Computing represents the fusion of very real trends such as global-class architecture, Web platforms, massively scalable processing and the Internet."
These trends point to cloud computing's potential to provide a deeper intelligence in the systems and processes of our business and institutional infrastructures - enabling goods to be produced, distributed and recycled; oil to be located and drilled quickly and efficiently; and services to be delivered to consumers in new, exciting and greatly disruptive ways.
Bridging the so-called "Digital Divide" has long been a goal in the Internet age, wherein technology becomes a conduit for levelling the world's playing field between haves and have not's. With the rise of cloud computing, this goal becomes more attainable as a result of innovative Cloud projects and applications.
Undoubtedly, cloud computing will continue to grow in the years ahead. And when industry observers of the future look back at these early days of adoption, they'll recognise the tectonic shift caused by Cloud Computing, which has both transformed enterprise IT delivery and established the Internet as an effective enterprise computing platform.
Mike Brookbanks is Dynamic Infrastructure and Cloud Leader, IBM UK & Ireland.
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