These days it seems like just about every
vendor is pushing its numerous and varied cloud offerings. It also seems
like businesses are holding off on moving to cloud computing with just
as much vigor. Everyone has heard all the different cloud sales pitches:
Cloud services offer unlimited scalability, they provide global access
to computing services, they eliminate the need to buy private
infrastructure, they transform IT costs from CapEx to OpEx, they reduce
management, they allow IT to be greener, and the list goes on. The funny
thing is that despite all the hype, IT just isn’t buying it—at least
not yet. And this reluctance to jump headfirst into the cloud is
reflected by many of the cloud sales specials that you see popping up.
Many vendors, such as Amazon, are offering free low-level services to
try to get you started with their offerings. Other vendors, such as
Microsoft, are offering free trial periods to entice you to try their
services.
One of the reasons businesses aren’t all gaga about cloud services is
that these services harken back to an era of computing that fell out of
favor a decade or two ago—the era of the mainframe. If you think about
it, cloud computing is a lot like the old centralized IT processing
model of the past embodied by the mainframe. Computing power is moved
away from the end users and into a centralized entity that’s managed by
someone else. To be fair, the cloud isn’t really centralized the way
mainframes of the past were (and are). However, the cloud and mainframes
are alike in that they both move the computing power and infrastructure
governance farther from the users of those platforms. Given the nature
of cloud computing, the mainframe appears to be something like the
ultimate cloud platform. Extreme scalability, availability,
virtualization, and usage-based metering have been part of the mainframe
for decades. And this mainframe mentality is part of the problem many
organizations have with the cloud. Businesses moved away from that model
of centralized computing on purpose. Businesses, and perhaps more
specifically their departments and end users, wanted more control of
their computing resources. They didn’t want to share them with other
business units—let alone other businesses. This is exactly what the
cloud requires that you do. These factors led to the rise of distributed
PC computing, client/server computing, and the web that we use today.
Somewhat ironically, Microsoft was one of the leading vendors driving
the push behind the distributed PC computing model and away from the
centralized computing model, but today Microsoft is one of the leaders
in the push to the cloud.
I know that cloud vendors would adamantly disagree with this
assessment, but in some ways moving to the cloud is a bit like a step
back in time. Cloud computing definitely moves much of the control of
the computing resources away from the end users they service. The cloud
also moves control of those resources out of the hands of IT. This isn’t
the first time an attempt has been made to resurrect this centralized
computing model. About a decade ago vendors tried to sell IT on the
then-hot trend of thin-client computing. IT didn’t buy into that one,
either—although perhaps in the long run it did herald the transition
away from desktop applications to browser-based applications.
Perhaps computing trends are just like fashion, and just like those
old bell bottoms from the 1960s have come back, so will the centralized
computing model—as the cloud but with a modern twist. Certainly the
landscape today is vastly different than it was in the era of the
mainframe, or even a decade ago when thin-client computing was the media
darling. Network connections are better today and the Internet, though
far from perfect, is more reliable. But the $64,000 question around the
future of cloud computing is, What do businesses really want? Do they
really want to move back to a more centralized computing model in which
the processing power and the control of IT resources lie outside the
walls of the business, or do they prefer the more distributed, albeit
more complex, model of distributed computing that we have today?
