First applications, then servers, now ... EVERYTHING ?
Michael Kneip Within the past couple of months the already intense cloud race has absolutely exploded. From Microsoft's fantastic new reboot of Azure, to Google newly announced IaaS (infrastructure as a service) offering, to Amazon's endless stream of improvements and enhnacements to its AWS platform, cloud innovating is at light speed right now.
I think we can expect crticial new developments over the next twelve month as the result of all this innovation. First, every application that wants to remain successful will be migrated to the cloud, probably in an PaaS (platform as a service) model, though possilbly also in an IaaS model. By 2013 any application that hasn't fully embraced cloud will be dead man walking. Second, organizations are going to have to figure out the businesss case for KEEPING technology in-house, opposite of today's dynamic where IT managers have been cautious about moving things off premise. The cloud model is just too affordable, too stable, too reliable not to just wash away all the last of the Fear Uncertainty and Doubt that customers may have ... IT stakeholders will be all cloud all the time starting in 2013, count on it.
Where does this lead? How about no more routers and switches, it's all just handled in the software. Imagine that if you can. Not only will you be putting servers and applications into the cloud, the entire network down to every last switch port, will be a candidate for public and provide cloud. The technology isn't mainstreamed yet, but it's getting close, and after the 2013 tidal wave of cloud, we should see companies beginning to adopt cloud/virtualization strategies for the entire network.
Should be a really exciting couple of years.