The hype around cloud computing has probably been among the most persistent and long enduring ‘next-killer-thing’ kind of conversations for a while now. Try as you might, you can’t get away without having a ‘cloud strategy’ in place. But like one CTO pointed out on LinkedIn, “Yes and we have had one in place for years. It is only marketeers who have suddenly ‘discovered’ the cloud”. And rightly so, marketers can’t be left to discover technologies or create spin around what will drive adoption. Technology adoption drivers need to be grounded in a sound business case and logic.
It is for this very reason that I find it baffling as to what CIOs/ CTOs will typically cite as drivers for cloud adoption. The focus is almost always on lowering the TCO (typical marketing spiel) which we at Anunta have spoken about before and believe is flawed in today’s context. Let’s look at some of the commonly mentioned cloud drivers.
All of these drivers are definitely reasons to look at the cloud but I also think that it misses the point to some extent. Cloud is fundamentally an application delivery model as were the MSP and ASP models of old. So as mentioned in our earlier posts, end-user experience is the imperative and application delivery becomes the means to that end. Consequently, cloud is the means to optimal application delivery. In fact, this holds true for physical on-premises infrastructure as well where if application delivery is considered critical and central to the enterprise infrastructure, then every other components of the infrastructure need to be aligned to facilitate it.
Once IT has this basic premise covered, the conventional drivers of cloud adoption begin to hold true. In that, costs become variable (pay as you go), scalability is instantaneous and consumerization of IT becomes truly viable.