Cloud becoming mainstream IT option

Peter Dinham
Thursday, 17 November 2011 10:05

Cloud computing has moved dramatically from being viewed as a 'disruptive' technology and service to quickly becoming a mainstream IT option, according to one analyst firm and market watcher.

In its latest report on cloud computing, IDC says that as cloud technologies and services mature and user understanding of their capabilities improve, the cloud will no longer be viewed as disruptive but, the market will, instead, see it as an innovation in business service delivery.

According to associate vice president for cloud technologies and services at IDC Asia/Pacific, Chris Morris, it is clear that the cloud is no longer viewed as a disruptive technology and he says IDC foresees that by 2015 the cloud will no longer exist as a standalone concept.

'It will be integrated into every facet of a business delivery service,' Morris says, and IDC predicts that the public cloud will 'metamorphose into outsourcing 3.0' and that cloud technologies will become intrinsic parts of the IT infrastructure landscape and an essential component of any IT environment.

"In enabling the enterprise move to this future, it is likely that IT executives will choose to help end-users meet their escalating business needs by offering IT 'as a service' rather than as a technology platform,' Morris suggests.

'In delivering these services to the business, the CIO will source more and more of these services externally - from the public cloud, from Virtual Private Clouds (VPC) hosted by an information and communications technology (ICT) service provider and from traditional outsourcers, which will also be using cloud technologies to deliver these services."

The end result, according to IDC, is that the CIO will be asked to manage a hybrid environment comprising of on-premises, outsourced, managed and cloud-sourced services. However, IDC says that the future for some organisations, will be not much different from 2010, except that the types of public cloud services will have moved from low-value trial implementations to applications which are central to their business - most of them will be based on virtualised, standardised and scalable platforms that were once known as 'The Cloud'.

Morris says that in the past two years there has been a rapid maturation of users' understanding of cloud services and cloud computing, and rather than the cloud being viewed as a collection of new technologies, savvy CIOs now see the cloud as an 'extension of their sourcing strategies."

'As a result, many organisations today are adding the public, virtual private and private cloud delivery models to their services sourcing portfolio. Just as they have added outsourced and managed services in the past, these organisations are applying the same selectivity and due diligence process to the cloud as they do to other externally sourced services.'

According to Morris, although CIOs today may have the answers to some of their initial concerns surrounding the use of the cloud, the challenge now is to be informed enough to be able to ask the smart questions about their potential cloud vendors to ensure that they make the best strategic decision. "This is a very important stage of the development of the cloud market," Morris concludes.

On 24 November, IDC will look further at the future for cloud computing, and how enterprises can future-proof their IT infrastructure and applications to incorporate the cloud as well as likely scenarios for the use of cloud technologies, at the Sydney-leg of its Asia/Pacific Cloud Conference 2011: Cloud 2.0, now being held across 10 major cities in Asia/Pacific.