Defining Cloud
A decade or so ago, service providers made a valiant attempt trying to change the way IT managed there applications and their data. There were a few issues that played a significant role in the demise of service provides back then however. First, there was a distinct lack of understanding of the velocity at which IT can and does change. Quite often I see infrastructure sales people proposing solutions to customer problems that require more of a “rip and replace” of existing infrastructure rather than complement it. Businesses don’t slow down. As new infrastructure is required to grow the business, the business still needs to keep moving. It’s a lot like trying to change the tires on a moving car.
Second, the network connectivity tended to preclude applications to connect to their data in a timely manner rendering the number of applications that could leverage the service provider less useful.
Finally, service provider sellers had a very difficult time talking to IT about the value proposition the service provider could bring to traditional IT as a complement to their existing business. This flimsy story, as well as concerns customers about security, data accessibility and other companies using their CPU cycles, customers we not motivated to bet their business on the “cloud”. Additionally, having dedicated hardware (server or storage) at a service provider actually provided no cost savings and was proven, over time, to actually cost more than managing it internally.
A decade later we have evolved quite a bit. The SSP’s of the past are now called “Cloud” providers. Cloud providers can now offer a set of offerings that span both servers as well as storage. Additionally the world’s internet connectivity is much more robust. Also cloud providers aren’t trying to boil the ocean. Cloud providers have a much better understanding of the type of applications they can service with a reasonable service levels. Multi-tenant technolgoy has also evolved such that it makes providing infrastructure as a service much more secure to clients making it more cost effective. VMware allows users to have dedicated servers, while virtual, to run their applications as well as keep costs low. Virtual servers lower the cost of high availability and make it easy to move servers throughout the infrastructure.
