CTO Blog
Recently I sat down with several of the colleagues and we were discussing the idea of cloud computing. Without going into details of what cloud computing is, let’s think about what they imply for a moment. In all previous incarnations of computing services, those services were extremely durable. Infrastructures, departments, organizations and other trappings of IT as a corporate function arose as yet another department within a corporation with a specific task. Cloud computing on the other hand, looks at things in a more ephemeral way relative to the relationships. In a cloud world, we’re encouraged to make relationships more casually, in the sense that the significant investment in infrastructure and organization is eliminated or minimized. This provides great flexibility, but it also accentuates a new perspective – we don’t have to stick to services that no longer meet our needs, because our sunk cost is negligible. This creates a brand new paradigm of ad hoc computing relationships, based on current and future value rather than past performance. It allows us to adapt and adopt quickly, but more important, it allows us to shed the past without extensive heart ache. As a corollary, the governance and coordination aspects of the cloud call for a new role – the cloud broker, who helps organizations establish, maintain and conclude relationships.
About the author
Hi Sean,
I’m not convinced that clouds really make sunk cost go away for anything but the most trivial use cases.
I’ve given my 10c here: http://ow.ly/nEXe
Cheers
Mike
The world has definitely moved to the cloud. This guy turned the old server closet that used to host e-mail etc. into a meat smoker!
http://bit.ly/eD7zf
Mike, I looked at your comments, and they make sense, but they weren’t exactly the way I was looking at the costs. Compared to buying the servers or a mainframe, licensing software, hiring an operations staff, Cloud definitely presents the possibility of a lower cost model (obviously the mileage will vary). You’re right though, moving from one to another will never be a “free” move and I don’t necessarily see moves being frequent. Cheers.
I agree with Mike´s opinion.
I’m very skeptic about the usability of cloud computing in organizations that have IT services as their core business. I still think CC it’s unreliable in many aspects, and you can’t put a cost on reliability.
Still, it’s an area that deserves our attention, as new developments will surely happen in the future.
Clouds (IAAS variant) need to perform and deliver, or people will move back to data centers. Take a look at the case of GitHub who save and gain by moving from Virtual machines in a cloud to physical machines (http://github.com/blog/493-github-is-moving-to-rackspace)
IT services as their core business. I still think CC it’s unreliable in many aspects, and you can’t put a cost on reliability.
Still, it’s an area that deserves our attention, as new developments will surely happen in the future.