Você está na página 1de 42

CLOUDS Roll in

An Afterword to
The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google

The

By Nicholas G. Carr

www.cloudsrollin.com

Copyright 2011 HCL Technologies All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any mean (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of HCL Technologies. Requests for permission should be directed to cloudsrollin@hcl.com

CONTENTS

About the Author A Meeting in Monarch Beach Cloud First From Dedicated to Shared The View from the Enterprise A Cloud of One's Own A Cloud in Every Pocket The Path of Disruption About HCL Technologies References Company and People Index

1 3 5 9 13 17 23 27 31 33 36

Important Note: This afterword is not for sale or any other commercial purposes. Strictly for distribution by HCL Technologies only. Mass circulation is prohibited.

The Clouds Roll in

About the Author

icholas G. Carr (aka Nick) is the author of three influential books about technology and its implications: Does IT Matter? Information Technology and the Corrosion of Competitive Advantage (2004), The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google (2008), and The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (2010). A former executive editor of Harvard Business Review, he has written for many periodicals, including The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Financial Times, Atlantic, New Republic, Sloan MIT Management Review, Strategy & Business and Wired. Nick is a member of the Encyclopedia Britannica's editorial board of advisors, is on the steering board of the World Economic Forum's cloud computing project, and writes the popular blog Rough Type.

www.cloudsrollin.com

The Clouds Roll in

A Meeting

in Monarch

Beach

www.cloudsrollin.com

A Meeting in Monarch Beach

n September 2010, I traveled to Monarch Beach, California, to attend the InformationWeek 500 Conference, a large annual gathering of CIOs and other information technology executives. My most recent book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, had come out a couple of months earlier, and Fritz Nelson, InformationWeeks editorial director, had invited me to the event to give a talk on the books themes. As I sat in on the other sessions, though, it became clear that the conferences major thrust was cloud computing, a topic that had been the focus of my previous book, The Big Switch. Figuring out ways to capitalize on the promise of the cloud, while tempering the risks of being an early adopter of the powerful new set of technologies, had risen to the very top of the CIOs agenda. During a break in the proceedings, I had the pleasure of sitting down for a coffee with Anubhav Saxena, a top executive with HCL, a $5.7 billion IT services company and one of the conferences lead sponsors. Anubhav had been an enthusiastic reader of The Big Switch, and he was eager to share with me HCLs multifaceted plan to deliver the power of cloud computing to its global clientele. He walked me through a PowerPoint presentation on his laptop, and he gave me an early look at MyCloud, a service the company is developing that will provide companies with a simple dashboard for building, managing, and integrating cloud systems, applications, and services from a variety of providers. In The Big Switch, I had argued that the creation of intuitive cloud interfaces would be essential to the broad adoption of cloud computing, and MyCloud was one of the most ambitious cloud interfaces I had yet seen. One thing led to another, and Anubhav was soon asking me whether I had given any thought to writing an afterword to The Big Switch, reviewing the enormous progress in cloud computing technology and adoption that had taken place since the book was published early in 2008. I told him that, having spent the last two years researching and writing The Shallows, I was eager to revisit the subject of cloud computing. A series of phone calls and meetings ensued, which culminated in HCLs agreement to provide me with financial, logistical, and intellectual support in writing an update to The Big Switch. The afterword you are now reading is the result of that collaboration, and I am pleased to dedicate it to Anubhav and his colleagues.

www.cloudsrollin.com

The Clouds Roll in

Cloud First

www.cloudsrollin.com

Cloud First

wo months after the InformationWeek conference, on December 9th, 2010, the chief information officer of the United States, Vivek Kundra, released a sweeping plan for overhauling the way the federal government buys and manages information technology. The centerpiece of the plan was the adoption, effective immediately, of what Kundra termed a cloud first policy. Noting that the government had long been plagued by redundant and ineffective IT investments, which often ended up wasting taxpayer dollars, he argued that a shift to cloud computing would save a great deal of money while also improving the governments ability to roll out new and enhanced systems quickly. 1 To speed the adoption of the plan, Kundra ordered the IT departments of every government agency to move three major systems into the cloud by the summer of 2012. At the same time, he announced that the government would use cloud technologies, such as virtualization, to reduce the number of data centers it runs from 2,100 to 1,300, that it would create a marketplace for sharing excess data center capacity among agencies, and that it would establish performance, security, and contracting standards for the purchase of utility-computing services from outside providers. Once fully in place, the cloud first policy, Kundra predicted, would transform the governments cumbersome and inefficient IT bureaucracy into a streamlined operation able to deliver valuable new services to the American public. The Federal Government, he wrote, will be able to provision services like nimble start-up companies, harness available cloud solutions instead of building systems from scratch, and leverage smarter technologies that require lower capital outlays. Citizens will be able to interact with government for services via simpler, more intuitive interfaces. IT will open government, providing deep visibility into all operations. Kundras plan was remarkable for its scope and ambition. But even more remarkable was the fact that the plan provoked little controversy. Indeed, its release was met with a collective shrug from both the public and the IT community. That reaction, or, more precisely, lack of reaction, testifies to the sea change in attitudes about cloud computing that has occurred over the last few years. When The Big Switch was published in January 2008, awareness of the possibility of providing data processing and software applications as utility services over a public grid was limited to a fairly small set of IT

www.cloudsrollin.com

specialists, and the term cloud computing was little known and rarely used. Many IT managers and suppliers, moreover, dismissed the entire idea of the cloud as a pie-in-the-sky dream. Cloud computing, they argued, would not be fast enough, reliable enough, or secure enough to fulfill the needs of large businesses and other organizations. Its adoption would be limited to only the most unsophisticated and undemanding users of information technology. Today, just three years later, the skepticism has largely evaporated. There is still debate about how broadly the utility model will ultimately be adopted, but most IT vendors, computer engineers, CIOs, and technology pundits now accept, almost as a matter of faith, that the cloud will be a fundamental component of future IT systems. Even Microsofts chief executive, Steve Ballmer, once a vocal critic of utility computing, has become a true believer. He said of the cloud in a 2010 speech, Its the next step, its the next phase, its the next transition. At Microsoft, he continued, for the cloud, were all in.2 A few months later, the software giant put an exclamation point on its CEOs words when it announced it would spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a global cloud power advertising program, its largest ad campaign ever. A recent survey of 250 big international companies found that more than half of them are already using cloud services, while another 30 percent are in the process of testing or introducing such services. Only 1 percent of the companies said that they had rejected the use of cloud computing outright.3 In addition to Microsoft, most other traditional IT suppliers, including hardware and software makers as well as outsourcers, systems integrators, and consultants, are rushing to roll out and promote cloud services, and leading pure-play cloud providers such as Salesforce.com, Amazon Web Services, Google, and Workday are rapidly expanding their offerings and ramping up their sales efforts. Many billions of dollars are being invested every year in the construction of cloud data centers and networks, a construction boom that echoes the one which accompanied the rise of electric utilities a hundred years ago. But, truth be told, all this frenetic activity and marketing hype is a bit misleading. The business world, when it comes to the cloud, is far from all in. Outside the federal government, cloud-first policies remain rare. While most companies have embraced the theory of cloud computing, few have placed the cloud at the center of their IT strategy,4

www.cloudsrollin.com

Cloud First

and the actual adoption of cloud services remains in its infancy. Companies are, to be sure, using some cloud services and experimenting with others, but corporate investments in cloud computing, while growing at a healthy clip, still represent a small fraction of overall IT spending. And the investments that are being made tend to be narrowly focused on popular software-as-a-service applications. Only about 3 percent of big businesses are tapping into cloud data centers to run virtual servers, and fully 85 percent have no current plans to use such utility computing infrastructure, according to a 2009 survey.5 An equally high percentage say they have no existing plans to use the cloud for data storage.6 Much of the wariness about moving too quickly into the cloud can be traced to the many uncertainties that continue to surround cloud computing, including issues related to security and privacy, capacity, reliability, liability, data portability, standards, pricing and metering, and laws and regulations. Such uncertainties are neither unusual nor unexpected; similar ones have accompanied the build-out of earlier utility networks as well as transport and communications systems. Another force slowing the adoption of cloud computing is inertia. Many companies have made huge investments in in-house data centers and complex software systems and have spent years fine-tuning them. They are not going to tear everything out and start from scratch. For large businesses in particular, we are still at the beginning of what promises to be a long period of transition to cloud computing. The cloud is revolutionizing business computing, but this will not be an overnight revolution. It is one that will, as I argued in The Big Switch, play out over the course of at least a decade and more likely two. That does not mean, though, that corporate executives and IT professionals should be complacent. The current transitional period will be marked by myriad advances and setbacks as well as many upheavals not just technological but also commercial and social. Making the wrong choices about the cloud today could leave an organization at a disadvantage for years to come.

www.cloudsrollin.com

The Clouds Roll in

From Dedicated

to Shared

www.cloudsrollin.com

From Dedicated to Shared

t is already quite clear that cloud computing is emerging as the dominant new technological model for computer systems. The models it supplants, such as, notably, the client-server model, entailed tight connections between hardware and software and between systems and users. Computers and related gear were dedicated to particular applications, and those applications were dedicated to particular individuals (in the case of PCs) or groups (in the case of servers). These models were, as a result, highly fragmented, characterized by redundant assets and investments and low levels of capacity utilization. The cloud model, in contrast, is built on the assumption of sharing, in particular the pooling of assets to support a diversity of uses and users. Hardware is shared flexibly by applications, and applications (and other resources) are shared flexibly among heterogeneous users. As with any utility system, the shared, or multitenant, infrastructure dramatically reduces redundancy, improves utilization, and in general capitalizes on scale economies. As defined by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the emerging cloud model has five essential characteristics, all of which relate to the flexible sharing of assets: On-demand self-service. A consumer can unilaterally provision computing capabilities, such as server time and network storage, as needed automatically without requiring human interaction with each services provider. Broad network access. Capabilities are available over the network and accessed through standard mechanisms that promote use by heterogeneous thin or thick client platforms (e.g., mobile phones, laptops, and PDAs). Resource pooling. The providers computing resources are pooled to serve multiple consumers using a multi-tenant model, with different physical and virtual resources dynamically assigned and reassigned according to consumer demand. There is a sense of location independence in that the customer generally has no control or knowledge over the exact location of the provided resources but may be able to specify location at a higher level of abstraction (e.g., country, state, or data center). Examples of resources include storage, processing, memory, network bandwidth and virtual machines.

www.cloudsrollin.com

10

The Clouds Roll in

Resource pooling. The providers computing resources are pooled to serve multiple consumers using a multi-tenant model, with different physical and virtual resources dynamically assigned and reassigned according to consumer demand. There is a sense of location independence in that the customer generally has no control or knowledge over the exact location of the provided resources but may be able to specify location at a higher level of abstraction (e.g., country, state, or data center). Examples of resources include storage, processing, memory, network bandwidth and virtual machines.
Rapid elasticity. Capabilities can be rapidly and elastically provisioned, in some cases automatically, to quickly scale out and rapidly released to quickly scale in. To the consumer, the capabilities available for provisioning often appear to be unlimited and can be purchased in any quantity at any time. Measured Service. Cloud systems automatically control and optimize resource use by leveraging a metering capability at some level of abstraction appropriate to the type of service (e.g., storage, processing, bandwidth, and active user accounts). Resource usage can be monitored, controlled, and reported providing transparency for both the provider and consumer of 7 the utilized service.

Along with the cost efficiencies and flexibility benefits that come with shared infrastructure and applications, the cloud model benefits users by distancing them from the complexity inherent in building and running modern IT systems. The users purchase and configure IT services through relatively simple interfaces without regard to either the location or the architecture of the systems delivering the services. In other words, cloud systems allow not only the consolidation of physical assets but also the consolidation of the expertise required to build and maintain the systems. The consolidation of assets and expertise in large-scale, industrialized IT plants also spurs rapid innovation in data-center and systems design. Already, for example, the growth of cloud computing has led to important breakthroughs in energy efficiency and cooling breakthroughs which in time will disseminate throughout the industry, benefiting all.

11

www.cloudsrollin.com

From Dedicated to Shared

Because information technology is highly modular, new architectural models do not simply replace old ones. Rather they build on top of, or at least alongside of, the old models. Companies continued to use mainframes along with client-server systems, and both those models will continue to be used along with cloud models. Nevertheless, because of its fundamental advantages in cost, flexibility, energy efficiency, and ease of use, the cloud model will increasingly be the model of choice for building new systems. As devices and applications are built to take advantage of cloud systems and central databases, moreover, the cloud model will gain further momentum and become increasingly entrenched at the core of modern information processing.

www.cloudsrollin.com

12

The Clouds Roll in

View

The

Enterprise

from the

13

www.cloudsrollin.com

The View from the Enterprise

or large companies, the cloud is typically used today not as a replacement for in-house systems but as a complement, supplement, and extension to those systems. Software-as-aservice (SaaS) subscriptions provide an easy, low-risk way to extend or modernize standard corporate applications, from human-resource administration and accounting to salesforce automation and project management, while also accommodating the mobile devices and remote collaboration that are essential to many modern business processes. Cloud-based programming platforms (PaaS) allow for the rapid development, testing, and rollout of new software applications and features without requiring investments in in-house servers and development tools. And the ability to rent large amounts of storage and server capacity and other infrastructural services online (IaaS) enables companies to deal effectively with the kind of short-term computing requirements often involved in conducting research and analysis projects or meeting seasonal spikes in demand. The pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly has made the cloud a central part of its vast R&D program. The company encourages its scientists to tap into cloud data centers for early-stage number-crunching in analyzing potential new drug compounds. It has developed more than a dozen templates for cloud use in different research scenarios, allowing scientists to rent virtual servers for pennies an hour with their corporate credit cards. The cost is trivial in some cases for what they're doing, Eli Lilly CIO Michael Heim said at an IT industry conference in 2010. Its hard to overestimate the value of letting scientists work at their own pace. Using the cloud for research has allowed Lilly to cancel plans for building a third in-house data center for R&D. The savings have been so great that the company is now looking to extend its use of the cloud to ongoing computing needs as well as short-term projects.8 It is also developing cloud management software that will allow it to easily shift jobs among different cloud vendors, reducing the risk of getting locked in to one providers services, and it is looking to set up an industry consortium to facilitate cloud-based collaboration among drug researchers from different companies. One leading U.S. retail chain is looking to the cloud to reach a new generation of shoppers who expect to gather information and services through their smartphones and other mobile devices even when theyre inside a brick-and-mortar store. The company, according to one of its top IT executives, has spent 20 years building a tightly integrated suite of in-house systems for managing its far-flung operations,

www.cloudsrollin.com

14

The Clouds Roll in

including specialized applications for purchasing, warehousing, shipping, store management, and merchandising, and starting from scratch with cloud solutions would be not only impractical but foolish. In the retailing industry, the executive explained to me in an interview, if you have something that works, you don't rip and replace it. You can add new things, you can enhance things, but the idea of pitching out the baby with the bath water is never going to be an option in retail. At the same time, he emphasized that the way companies think about IT has changed drastically over the past three years, thanks in large measure to the new opportunities opened up by cloud computing. Companies no longer look at IT as an infrastructure or a platform or software or an application, he said. Everythings a service whether its supplied through the cloud or from a private data center. The retailer has already extended its in-house systems with more than 100 applications provided as services by outside suppliers, and, according to the executive, it will draw on cloud solutions to deliver a range of information services and applications to the mobile devices of the next generation of shoppers. He foresees a variety of Web-based apps that will provide extra value to consumers while also promoting in-store and online purchases. Not all CIOs are taking a slow and steady approach to cloud computing. Bob Rudy believes that the faster his company takes advantage of the benefits of the cloud, the more competitive it will become. A former Intel engineer and technology entrepreneur, Rudy has since 2007 been vice president and chief information officer of Avago Technologies, a $2 billion semiconductor company that was once part of Hewlett-Packard. His view of IT is hard-nosed I want just enough and nothing more, he says and for the past two years he has been aggressively replacing the companys in-house systems with cloud alternatives. Owning software doesnt make sense, he told me during an interview late in 2010, making an exception only for the specialized software that directly supports the companys core engineering functions. He feels the same way about proprietary data centers: I dont want to own a power plant if I can share a grid. In 2008, Avago became the first company with over a billion dollars in sales to adopt the Google Apps Enterprise suite of productivity tools, including e-mail and calendars. The shift is saving the company about $1.6 million annually, but the more important advantage, according to Rudy, is the gain in organizational flexibility and empowerment.

15

www.cloudsrollin.com

The View from the Enterprise

Avagos engineers and other employees no longer have to worry about hitting limits in their in-box capacity, which in these days of rich media can slow their work and impede their creativity, and Rudy no longer has to worry about investing precious time and money in installing ever greater quantities of new storage capacity to keep up with demand. In addition to Google Apps, the company has rolled out a series of other major software-as-a-software applications, including ones from Workday, Taleo, Authoria and Enlighta. Avago has also moved much of its IT infrastructure into the hands of outside suppliers, and is encouraging them to use multitenant systems whenever possible. The bottom-line benefits of Avagos cloud-centered strategy have been impressive. The company has already pushed its IT costs as a percentage of revenues down to just 1.6 percent, considerably lower than the 4.2 percent average for the high-tech products industry, and Rudy says that the figure will soon be less than 1 percent. Rudys only frustration is that he cant move even more quickly into the cloud. If he wasnt locked in to long-term licenses for enterprise-resource-planning applications, he says, he would have been even more aggressive in moving to cloud alternatives. We will pursue every cloud service we can, he declares, arguing that the biggest barrier to cloud adoption today is fear, uncertainty and doubt spread by IT professionals themselves. Whats now clear is that there is no one correct recipe for adopting cloud computing, just as there was no one right recipe for adopting mainframe computers, minicomputers, PCs, or client-server systems. Different companies and industries have also employed IT in different ways, and those difference will continue to influence the way they adopt and use the cloud model. But all businesses need to be aware that the risks of moving too slowly may be as great, or greater, than the risks of moving too quickly. Past practices and sunk costs are, as always, weak excuses for inaction. As the competitive pressure to gain the cost and performance benefits of cloud computing intensifies, complacency will become an ever greater liability.

www.cloudsrollin.com

16

The Clouds Roll in

A Cloud of Ones

Own

17

www.cloudsrollin.com

A Cloud of One's Own

hat may, over the next few years, represent the largest cloudinspired area of investment for large companies has little to do with the purchase of Web-based services from outside utilities. Rather, it involves the construction of so-called private clouds highly virtualized, dedicated data centers that essentially serve as inhouse IT utilities. A private cloud can be owned and operated by the company that uses it or, as is increasingly the case, it can be built and run on the companys behalf by an outsourcing or hosting firm or other IT services company. Because the transformation of traditional data centers into private clouds typically requires substantial investments in new hardware and software, to facilitate high degrees of virtualization and automation, their construction has been a boon to many IT vendors. Deutsche Bank predicts that investments in private clouds will reach $20 billion in 2012. The case for a private cloud is often compelling today. Because they typically have much higher levels of capacity utilization and scalability than the traditional data centers they replace, they can allow a company to gain many of the scale economies and speed and flexibility benefits of the public cloud while avoiding the security concerns, contracting issues, and other uncertainties that currently surround pure utility computing. Just as many large manufacturers originally constructed their own in-house electricity-generating stations early in the last century, so many large businesses today are building their own in-house clouds. FedEx, a long-time IT pacesetter that relies on an array of custom applications to coordinate time-sensitive shipments around the globe, is in the process of moving to a private cloud. It is in the midst of a major effort to retool its core apps to run on a standardized and highly virtualized computing platform, drawing on a common data store as well as a shared set of data services, such as the provision of a delivery address. As each app is updated, it is being moved into a large new cloud data center the company has constructed in Colorado Springs. FedEx CIO Rob Carter is convinced that the cloud model represents a fundamental breakthrough in corporate IT. What's happening now, he recently told InformationWeek, is theres truly a general-purpose computing environment thats workload agnostic. You can throw different kinds of workloads on the same computing server infrastructure. Despite the significant data center and application investments entailed in building a private cloud, the modernization effort is delivering a very high return on investment, according to Carter.

www.cloudsrollin.com

18

The Clouds Roll in

For the first time ever, he explains, you can make investments in a whole new class of technology for about the same price of just maintaining the base. 9 Its important to recognize, however, that dedicated private clouds will in most cases be a transitional technology, a stepping stone on the way to true multi-tenant systems. At some point, after all, private clouds will begin to pay diminishing returns; further gains will require the greater scale that can only come from infrastructure and services that are shared among many companies rather than within just one company. Even today, the divide between private and public clouds can be blurry. Its possible, for instance, to operate a private cloud as a virtual private data center or virtual private clouda virtualized assembly of network, security, storage, and compute resources that is dedicated to a single client but runs on a multi-tenant system. Just as most companies today are comfortable using virtual private networks to ensure secure communication while gaining the scale benefits of shared infrastructure, they may well come to embrace virtual private data centers quickly. In the long run, truly private clouds may end up being operated only when required to meet legal or regulatory requirements for security or privacy. It is also likely that well see the emergence of vertical clouds clouds dedicated to particular industries, or to groups of related government agencies or educational institutions, with resources and performance standards geared to the unique needs of those industries. Bob Rudy, the Avago CIO, has begun talks with other semiconductor CIOs in hopes of creating vertical clouds in that industry. Sundeep Reddy, vice president and head of IT infrastructure at Toys R Us, believes that vertical clouds may provide a way for retail firms to share custom IT infrastructure while also giving them the leeway to maintain competitive differentiation in their applications. Its also easy to see how specialized vertical clouds, providing the benefits of multitenancy while ensuring tighter controls than is possible with purely public clouds, could be attractive to industries with unique datasecurity requirements such as health care and defense. Vertical clouds could also enable the efficient sharing of infrastructure and applications among state governments, schools, nonprofits, and other organizations serving similar constituencies. However the tensions between dedicated and multi-tenant resources and services play out, one thing seems very clear: for the

19

www.cloudsrollin.com

A Cloud of One's Own

foreseeable future, most organizations will operate in a hybrid IT environment, using some combination of traditional in-house IT resources, private or virtual private clouds, vertical clouds, public clouds, and software-as-a-service applications. Developing tools and processes for managing that hybrid environment and integrating diverse sets of assets, services, and data stores will be a key challenge for IT departments, and a key competitive battlefield for the IT industry. One area particularly ripe for innovation is the creation of user interfaces and dashboards that allow companies to easily build, integrate, and monitor complex virtualized systems that draw on the full set of cloud assets and software-as-a-service offerings. HCLs MyCloud, HPs CloudSystem, BMCs Cloud Lifecycle Management, and CAs AppLogic are examples of the kind of cloud-management platforms that could fundamentally change corporate IT operations, and further reshape the IT industry, in the near future. In addition to new tools for integrating and managing cloud services, the fulfillment of the promise of cloud computing will require cloud providers to join together in adopting the kind of clear, coherent, transparent, and measurable performance standards required to support contracts, service-level agreements, regulatory compliance, and interoperability. Much progress remains to be made in this area. A 2010 study of current cloud-computing contracts, undertaken by the Cloud Legal Project at the Centre for Commercial Law Studies, Queen Mary, University of London, revealed a lack of consistency in terms, and also indicated that most cloud providers currently seek to avoid any warranty of service or acceptance of liability. The World Economic Forums cloud-computing research group has underscored the need for more consistent and comprehensive approaches to accountability for how cloud services are provided as well as the establishment of clear standards for data portability and interoperability across cloud services. Competition among cloud providers may solve these problems, as those vendors that offer the clearest terms and standards will likely gain a competitive advantage in the marketplaceforcing other providers to follow suit. But if the industry fails to address these critical issues, governments may need to establish licensing or other certification programs for cloud providers, guranteeing a basic level of performance, reliability, and security. Establishing and certifying minimum standards in such areas as privacy, intellectual property

www.cloudsrollin.com

20

The Clouds Roll in

protection, and data compatibility will be essential to the broad and accelerated adoption of cloud computing in the future, argues R. Srikrishna, executive vice president and head of infrastructure services at HCL.

21

www.cloudsrollin.com

A Cloud of One's Own

www.cloudsrollin.com

22

The Clouds Roll in

A Cloud in Every

Pocket

23

www.cloudsrollin.com

A Cloud in Every Pocket

he cloud turns many old assumptions on their head. Up until recently, if you wanted to see the cutting edge in information technology, youd look at what big corporations were doing. They were the ones that had the money and the skills needed to build the most advanced data centers, procure the latest servers and other gear, and write or buy the most sophisticated software programs. Today, when it comes to the users of information technology, the cutting edge is found not inside big companies but rather in homes, schools, and startups those are the places where cloud computing is not only firmly in the mainstream but has already become, in many instances, the dominant form of computing. Consider your own or, better yet, your kids experience with personal computing. Five years ago, if you wanted to do something new with your PC, your first instinct was almost certainly to go out to a store and a purchase a packaged software application. Youd bring home the box, slide the CD or DVD into your optical drive, and install the application onto your hard drive, making sure it was compatible with your operating system and other applications. Every couple of years youd pay for an upgrade and go through the same installation process. Thats no longer the case. Now, when you want to do something new with a computer, you fire up your web browser, hop onto the Net, and find the data, applications, and services you need. Your first instinct, in other words, is to look to the cloud where, more likely than not, youll find what you want, and probably for free. The entire Web 2.0 and social networking phenomenon, which has transformed personal computing in the last few years, is an outgrowth of cloud computing. A social site like Facebook, which is now the Webs most popular destination as well as an increasingly attractive platform for online games and other applications, is unthinkable without the cloud. Facebook requires the kind of seamless, large-scale sharing of data and applications that is only possible with centralized, multitenant systems running on the Internet. Most of the popular apps used on iPhones, iPads, Android devices, and other smartphones and tablets also rely on cloud databases and services for at least part of their functionality, even if they also involve the installation of software code on an internal flash drive. Modern gaming consoles, too, now routinely integrate cloud services served up from distant data centers. For the first time in the history of personal computing, consumers are today purchasing computers that actually have smaller storage drives than the ones they are replacing. Local storage is becoming less important as

www.cloudsrollin.com

24

The Clouds Roll in

the cloud becomes more versatile. Its no exaggeration to say that, when it comes to personal computing, the big switch has already happened. Small companies, particularly entrepreneurial startups, have also often been aggressive adopters of cloud computing, as have schools, government agencies, and nonprofits. For these kinds of organizations, which often have limited capital and tightly constrained budgets, the cloud can be a great leveler. By tapping into cloud data centers and subscribing to Web-based applications, cash-strapped organizations can gain access to modern, sophisticated IT services that were once available only to big companies with deep pockets. Indeed, since cloud systems can be continuously updated, they often provide superior capabilities to expensive, installed systems, the upgrading of which is usually costly and time-consuming. As many smaller organizations have found, simply replacing an in-house email system with a cheap Web-based alternative can free up considerable amounts of money and avoid maintenance headaches and expenses while also providing users with far more storage capacity and advanced features than they would otherwise have had. The common theme here and its one of the central messages of cloud computing is the democratization of data processing. By driving down the cost and increasing the accessibility of computing power, the cloud continues the long-term trend of making ever more powerful computing resources available to individuals and small groups. If the arrival of the PC meant that everyone had access to a computer, the arrival of cloud computing means that everyone has access to an entire data center. This trend also has important implications inside corporations. As the purchase of applications and other IT services becomes simpler, faster, and cheaper as, in other words, self-service becomes a reality end users, such as business units, corporate functions, and even individual employees are increasingly purchasing IT services directly, without routing requests through the IT department. Historically, explains Kevin Parikh, CEO of Avasant, an outsourcing advisory firm, the buyer of IT services is the chief information officer of a company. And today the buyer with the advent of cloud computing can oftentimes be ... someone more directly connected with the service. As the Facebook generation enters the workplace, the expectation of self-service in IT will only grow. A core challenge for IT departments is to facilitate this self-service trend, and the innovation it promises to engender, while also ensuring the maintenance of the

25

www.cloudsrollin.com

A Cloud in Every Pocket

controls needed to safeguard corporate data and meet regulatory requirements. Eli Lillys use of end-user templates for deploying cloud services will likely become a common practice in many companies, as will the use of unified interfaces that incorporate management controls.

www.cloudsrollin.com

26

The Clouds Roll in

Path Disruption
of

The

27

www.cloudsrollin.com

The Path of Disruption

n the end, the best way to understand the import of cloud computing is through the disruptive innovation framework laid out by Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen in his 1997 book The Innovators Dilemma. Drawing on a breadth of research into technological advances, Christensen demonstrated that upheavals tend to follow a pattern. In its early stages, a disruptive technology is characterized by relatively weak performance, which restricts its adoption to companies or individuals with limited cash, low performance requirements, or both. But the performance of the disruptive technology advances quickly, making it attractive to an ever broader set of users. Eventually, the disruptive technology is able to fulfill the needs of even the most sophisticated and demanding users, at which point it becomes the dominant technology in the marketplace. Cloud computing is advancing up the performance curve just as Christensens framework predicts, and it seems only a matter of time before it becomes the IT model of choice not only for individuals and small companies but for the largest corporations. Beyond the technological changes, the advance of the cloud will mean a realignment of the IT work force, with some jobs disappearing, some shifting from users to suppliers, and others becoming more prominent. On the supplier side, well likely see booming demand for the skills required to design and run reliable large-scale, multi-tenant computing plants. Expertise in parallel processing, virtualization, energy management and cooling, security and encryption, high-speed networking and data caching, and related fields will be coveted and rewarded. Much software will also need to be written or rewritten to run efficiently on the new infrastructure. In a clear sign of the new labor requirements, Google and IBM have teamed up to spearhead a major education initiative aimed at training university students to write programs for cloud systems. On the user side, as the transition to the utility model accelerates in the years to come, well likely to see a steady decline in jobs related to building and maintaining in-house computer systems, while skills in information management and process design and automation will remain highly valued. We may see as well the rise of a new kind of IT professiona l a services broker who serves as the interface between cloud services and business units, crafting a flexible portfolio of IT services to meet business needs. The most aggressive adopters of cloud computing have already experienced a change in the makeup of their IT departments. The size of those departments is shrinking, but the

www.cloudsrollin.com

28

The Clouds Roll in

positions that remain tend to be the more senior, more strategic ones. For years, the knock on corporate IT has been that it is out of sync with business needs that there is, as the clich goes, a lack of alignment between the IT department and the business units. The weak alignment, it can now be seen, was a symptom of the isolation that up until recently served as the foundational assumption of corporate IT isolated infrastructure, isolated applications, isolated data, and, all too often, isolated users. This assumption of isolation conflicted with the assumption of sharing that underpins business itself. (The reason business organizations exist is to allow collaboration among employees.) By for the first time making sharing the underlying assumption of IT, the cloud promises to finally bring IT and business into alignment at least for those companies that embrace the clouds promise. CIOs recognize this opportunity, and theyre embracing it. In fact, the single most surprising development in cloud computing over the past three years has been the 180-degree change in the attitudes of forward-looking CIOs. Far from seeing the cloud as a threat, as many originally did, they now view utility-style computing as an opportunity to strengthen their own roles in their companies by shedding or outsourcing non-strategic activities and focusing their efforts on core business tasks. Early in 2011, I attended a panel discussion on cloud computing involving a group of prominent CIOs in Silicon Valley. They were unanimous in their sense that, as one of them put it, the cloud was making the CIO position more relevant than ever. CIOs arent buying all the current hype about the cloud theyre a skeptical bunch but they now view cloud computing as essential to the future of their companies and their careers. Were at the dawn of a new era in business. Just as the last centurys electric utilities spurred the development of thousands of new consumer appliances and services, so the new computing utilities will shake up many markets and open myriad opportunities for innovation. We see this transformation playing out not just in IT departments and the IT industry but across information-intensive industries like media and entertainment. Harnessing the power of the electric grid was the great enterprise of the twentieth century. Harnessing the power of the cloud is shaping up to be the great enterprise of the twenty-first century.

29

www.cloudsrollin.com

The Path of Disruption

www.cloudsrollin.com

30

The Clouds Roll in

About HCL Technologies

31

www.cloudsrollin.com

About HCL Technologies

HCL Technologies is a leading global IT services company, working with clients in the areas that impact and redefine the core of their businesses. Since its entry into the global landscape after its IPO in 1999, HCL has focused on transformational outsourcing, underlined by innovation and value creation, and offers an integrated portfolio of services including software-led IT solutions, ITO and infrastructure management, engineering services and business process outsourcing. HCL leverages its extensive global delivery centers and network of offices in 31 countries to provide holistic, multi-service delivery in key industry verticals including Financial Services, Retail, Media and Publishing, Pharmaceuticals, Manufacturing, Consumer Services, Public Services and Healthcare. HCLs Employee First philosophy has helped HCL recruit and retain the best talent in the industry, growing to over 80,000 employees from diverse cultures worldwide. Governed by its core values trust, transparency and flexibility, HCL Technologies is known for delivering consistent IT and business value in mission critical environments. HCL Technologies posted its consolidated revenues of US$3.1 billion (LTM as on December 31st, 2010). For more information, log on to www.hclisd.com and www.hcltech.com

www.cloudsrollin.com

32

The Clouds Roll in

References

33

www.cloudsrollin.com

References

Vivek Kundra, 25 Point Implementation Plan to Reform Federal Information Technology Management, December 9, 2010 http://cio.gov/documents/25-Point-Implementation-Plan-to-ReformFederal%20IT.pdf. 2 Steve Ballmer, Cloud Computing, speech at the University of Washington, March 4, 2010. 3 F5 Networks, Cloud Computing Survey: June to July 2009: http://www.f5.com/pdf/reports/cloud-computing-survey-results2009.pdf. 4 Gartner, Gartner Survey Shows Cloud-Computing Services Represents 10 Percent of Spending on External IT Services in 2010, September 22, 2010: http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1438813. 5 Forrester, The State of Emerging Enterprise Hardware: 2009 to 2010, December 1, 2009: http://www.forrester.com/rb/Research/state_of_emerging_enterprise_ hardware_2009_to/q/id/55175/t/2. 6 Forrester, Business Users Are Not Ready for Cloud Storage, January 22, 2010: http://www.forrester.com/rb/Research/business_users_are_not_ready _for_cloud/q/id/56065/t/2. 7 Peter Mell and Tim Grance, The NIST Definition of Cloud Computing, October 7, 2009: http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/SNS/cloud-computing/cloud-def-v15.doc. 8 Charles Babcock, Eli Lilly Ties Future to Cloud, InformationWeek, September 14, 2010: http://www.informationweek.com/news/healthcare/clinicalsystems/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227400374. 9 Chris Murphy, FedEx CIO Explains the Real Power of the Cloud, InformationWeek, January 24, 2010: h t t p : / / w w w. i n f o r m a t i o n w e e k . c o m / n e w s / g l o b a l cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229100022. 10 Simon Bradshaw, Christopher Millard, and Ian Walden, Contracts for Clouds: Comparison and Analysis of the Terms and Conditions of Cloud Computing Services, Queen Mary, University of London, School of Law Legal Studies Research Paper No. 63/2010, September 1, 2010.

www.cloudsrollin.com

34

The Clouds Roll in

Company and People Index

35

www.cloudsrollin.com

Company and People Index

Amazon Web Services.......................................................................................7 Anubhav Saxena, VP-Marketing, HCL Technologies....................................4 Atlantic...............................................................................................................2 Authoria............................................................................................................15 Avago Technologies ........................................................................................15, 16

BMC........................................................................................................................20 Bob Rudy, VP and CIO, Avago Technologies..................................................15, 19

CA...........................................................................................................................20 Charles Babcock, Editor-at-large, InformationWeek.....................................34 Chris Murphy, Editor, InformationWeek..........................................................34 Christopher Millard, Professor, Privacy and Information Law, Queen Mary, University of London.............................................................................................34 Clayton Christensen, Professor, Harvard Business School.................................28

D E F

Deutsche Bank.......................................................................................................18 Dr. Ian Walden, Professor, Information and Communications Law, Queen Mary, University of London.............................................................................................34

Eli Lilly...............................................................................................................14, 26 Encyclopedia Britannica.........................................................................................2 Enlighta..................................................................................................................15

Facebook...........................................................................................................24, 25 FedEx......................................................................................................................18 Financial Times......................................................................................................2 Forrester.................................................................................................................34 Fritz Nelson, Editorial Director, InformationWeek.............................................4

www.cloudsrollin.com

36

The Clouds Roll in

Gartner..................................................................................................................34 Google................................................................................................................7, 28

H I

HCL...................................................................................................4, 20, 21, 31, 32 HP ...........................................................................................................................15

IBM........................................................................................................................28 InformationWeek....................................................................................4, 6, 18, 34

Kevin Parikh, CEO, Avasant.................................................................................26

M N P

Michael Heim, CIO, Eli Lilly.................................................................................14 Microsoft.................................................................................................................7

National Institute of Standards and Technology...............................................10 New Republic.........................................................................................................2 New York Times.....................................................................................................2

Peter Mell. Computer Scientist, Computer Security Division, National Institute of Standards and Technology...............................................................34

37

www.cloudsrollin.com

Company and People Index

R S

R. Srikrishna, EVP and Head, Infrastructure Services, HCL...............................21 Rob Carter, CIO, FedEx...........................................................................................18 Rough Type.............................................................................................................2

Salesforce.com.........................................................................................................7 Simon Bradshaw, Consultant, Cloud Computing Project, Queen Mary, University of London.............................................................................................34 Sloan MIT Management Review...........................................................................2 Steve Ballmer, CEO, Microsoft..........................................................................7, 34 Strategy & Business................................................................................................2 Sundeep Reddy, VP and Head, Infrastructure, Toys R Us...................................19

Taleo........................................................................................................................15 The Wall Street Journal...........................................................................................2 The World Economic Forum....................................................................................2 Tim Grance, senior computer Scientist,IT, Laboratory at the National Institute of Standards and Technology..............................................................................34

U V

University of London.............................................................................................20 University of Washington......................................................................................34

Vivek Kundra, CIO, the United States...............................................................6, 34

Wired........................................................................................................................2 Workday..............................................................................................................7, 16

www.cloudsrollin.com

38

www.hclisd.com

Você também pode gostar