With innovations continuously taking place in Cloud Computing service offerings these days, a CIO or business owner should always keep his/her eyes open for four trends, according to IDC analyst Chris Morris at a recent CIO Summit in Australia. The trends include a scaling of services, data center transformation, big data provisioning and a consolidation in vendors.
- Scaling of services: As the CIO’s view about outsourcing is changing, the term “services” seems to be giving multiple meanings but carries the same context. IBM, for example, is a services provider offering manpower for technology integration. But it can also mean that the service provider builds their own data centers to offer a suite of services. Tata and CSC, too, are building data centers to offer this new form of services. This means that the cloud will be another tool in the tool kit and not just a place to move one’s infrastructure. In fact, the cloud should be where services are continually made better with the service management playing a critical role. And 3.0 is all about services, as Morris puts it. It is about integrating services for mobile devices, applications and information analytics.
- Data Center Transformation: With the goal have more than 100 VMs on each server by 2012, CIOs are currently facing a tough time. Virtualisation to this extent means to put stress on the network and storage infrastructures. As if this were not enough, the network and storage infrastructures are outdated leaving more to do for the CIOs: they need to consider the impact of this stress while considering the need for upgrades to the architecture.
- Big Data Provisioning: With all the buzz about big data, we can’t help but wonder how big an impact it is going to have. According to Morris, it will come down to how big data is provisioned. As the public cloud services are buying up the disk storage, they have instant, on-demand access to storage. They are the ones who will have the best prices and the most sophisticated capabilities for managing modern applications.
- Consolidation in vendors: Vendor consolidation is not that far off as there will be accelerated supplier consolidation resulting from the big data provisioning issue.
And wait! There is more to come. According to CIO Australia:
“By 2015 public Cloud will probably be more important than virtual private Cloud because those security and reliability levels will have come up and there will be 80 per cent of new applications developed for public Cloud,” Morris said.
As services create more technology requirements, this field will be hot with opportunities for people with technical skills; there will be a mix of 80% technicians and 20% managers in the IT organisation. We are in the middle of fast moving transformation to a services world right now which means a CIO has to consider what it means to engage in a market that is less about solutions and more about outsourcing to services providers.
Cloud computing is here to stay and STS is your Sydney Cloud Computing specialists. Call us today to learn more about how cloud solutions can help your Sydney business.
