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18:02 4th September 2009
Cloud computing was once dismissed by IT professionals and industry watchers as just the latest fad, the newest buzz in a sector renowned for hype and over-statement. But in recent years, with the support of major players including Microsoft and Google, cloud computing has been attracting serious attention.
Rather than the blue sky thinking of yesteryear, cloud computing is now very real, with companies of all sizes ditching traditional locally-hosted software for applications stored on remote computers owned and maintained by an external service provider. Cloud computing can be seen as part of the commoditisation of IT. Back in 2003, Nicholas Carr's groundbreaking article in the Harvard Business Review, IT Doesn't Matter, likened IT to a utility much energy or water. Just as 100 years ago large corporations would have a director of electricity, there is a growing school of thought that believes large, powerful, in-house IT departments will one day be similarly anachronistic.
"During the past 15 years, a continuing trend toward IT industrialisation has grown in popularity as IT services delivered via hardware, software and people are becoming repeatable and usable by a wide range of customers and service providers," said Daryl Plummer of the IT research firm, Gartner. "This is due, in part to the commoditisation and standardisation of technologies, in part to virtualisation and the rise of service-oriented software architectures, and most importantly, to the dramatic growth in popularity of the internet."
Lofty predictions are being made about the immediate future of cloud computing. For example, IDC, the research company, said in March this year that it expected global IT spend on cloud computing to reach $42 billion by 2012, which would represent a three-fold increase. Of the senior IT professionals canvassed by IDC, 11 per cent said they were already using cloud computing, while a further 41 per cent said they were either evaluating cloud computing solutions or running pilots. Only eight per cent said cloud computing was simply "vendor hype".
One of the key drivers for business users is financial. Moving to cloud computing creates opportunities to reduce spending on hardware maintenance and other costly IT functions. But there are other benefits. Robert Whiteside of Google Enterprise argues that just like social networking, blogging and instant messaging, cloud computing is in tune with the needs and skills of a modern workforce.
"Aside from the cost benefits, the ability to share and collaborate on information and access email and documents from any device makes sense for businesses," he explained. "Many of today's employees are already part of the 'cloud generation' who are used to the flexibility of online applications in their use of the internet at home and increasingly expect it at work."
Taylor Woodrow, the house builder, is one of the many large British corporates to have invested in cloud computing, signing up to Google's package, Google Apps, last summer. Rob Ramsey, the company's director of IT, said he expected the move to save Taylor Woodrow "approximately £1 million".
But what will this mean for IT professionals? Some industry watchers are predicting a sea change, with the development process as we know it undergoing nothing short of a revolution over the next decade.
"Businesses are increasingly frustrated at the cost and pace of internal IT operations," warned InfoWorld blogger Eric Knorr in a June post. "Cloud services... may soon form the greatest threat to IT since off-shoring."
The prospect of work currently carried out by corporate IT departments being outsourced to external service providers is likely to cause some concern among IT professionals. But as with almost all new technological developments, threats are accompanied by new opportunities.
Cloud computing opens up a new avenue for application development, with the clamour among service providers to improve their offerings, likely to lead to a growing number of opportunities for IT professionals.
Some have argued that the growth of cloud computing will lead to an up-skilling of IT jobs, with lower level positions being cut but more highly-skilled opportunities becoming available. Stephen Gill, vice president of HP, which is investing heavily in the concept of cloud computing, said last year that he expected working in IT to become more exciting. "Overall you will see less people but with different jobs, more exciting roles," he told ZDNet News, an online trade magazine, in April.
HP estimates that IT departments currently spend up to 70 per cent of their budget on maintaining infrastructure, which goes some way to illustrating the extent of the potential change for the IT profession over the next decade.
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