From the Editors: The cloud changes some things
By SD Times Editorial Board
August 15, 2011 —
(Page 1 of 3)
When you talk to a cloud solutions vendor—and we talk to all of them—the breathless refrain is, “The cloud changes everything!” You hear that over and over and over again.
When you talk to enterprise development managers, some of them are interested in the cloud, but many of them aren’t. Some of them see cloud-based systems as valuable for deployed applications, or for hosting development tools, or for reducing IT costs. Some of them value the scalability of the cloud, but others are concerned about bringing a third-party provider between them and their intellectual property. Some of them aren’t worried about security or standards—but many are.
And, of course, while the ROI benefits of the cloud sound great in marketing literature, it’s unclear exactly what the long-term financial implications are. Certainly there’s a shift from capital expenditures to operational budgets, but not all organizations value the CapEx vs. OpEx tradeoffs the same way.
What about DevOps, the new term often used for a combination of application life-cycle management + IT service management + the cloud? We hear that a lot more from vendors than we do from our readers.
So far, it looks like that the cries of “The cloud changes everything!” is a lot more hyperbole than reality. Certainly, we’re sure that a few organizations have totally embraced the cloud; use hosted development tools and collaborative workspaces; have powered down their data centers; and live an entirely Internet-based app world of mashups and virtual images and platform-as-a-service deployments.
We’re equally certain that the inverse it also true, that there are companies that see no reason to give up their tried-and-true development tools and practices, and are quite content to continue hosting their software, data and middleware inside their very own data centers, on their own hardware, running on their own networks behind their own firewalls, thank you very much.
Our own IT organization falls into a third group. Our core business systems continue to be developed and deployed using traditional technologies, but we’re carefully (and optimistically) experimenting with cloud-based solutions. The jury is out, however, as to whether, when and where those new technologies will be used for production systems.
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