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While other IT sectors may be struggling, one area that will likely be quite hot will be in the cloud computing/hosted services market. This particular market has been the subject of a great deal of hype over the last year, but it is likely that the overwhelming factor in cloud adoption this year will less be promotional marketing than it will simply be cost.

IT plants are expensive – they take up signficant real-estate, require a significant amount of air conditioning and electrical hardening in order to take power loads and properly disipate heat, they require system administrators monitoring and repairing these systems and have to be replaced and reconfigured periodically as systems go down.

The principle benefit of cloud computing (or at least of hosted services) is that much of this cost is effectively offloaded to the hosting service. Combine this with the development and deployment of hosted applications (which are increasing both in capabilities and reliability), either VPN or web-based, and what emerges is a very compelling story for many companies that are struggling trying to contain IT costs while tightening their belts.

Most cloud setups typically consist of “supercomputers” that are built as hundreds or even thousands of commodity server units that share memory and processing power and that are in turn tied into large scale storage arrays. Within this sea of memory and processing power, its possible to launch various “instances” – virtual machines that use the resources of the host system but exists as its own, for the most part independent “computer”.

What’s more, because these machines are effectively software only computers, they can be saved as if they were computer documents, then can be reloaded later, starting off once reloaded at precisely the point where they were saved. This means, consequently, that it becomes possible to create templates that can be stored then automatically loaded later whenever a given application (such as an operating system or configured database) needs to be restarted. These applications are known as appliances, and appliances make possible all kinds of interesting computing within the cloud.

Going forward the IT is going to switch from a technical to a more service delivery technical role. I need people that understand the platforms, know what to request from the vendors, how to manage them, how to work with the application teams to manage service delivery etc.

There remain challenges not least in the technology, there are many business units writing and supporting applications that might not be too pleased at the concept of buying-in the IT, the ‘loss of control’, in deciding the nuts and bolts of the infrastructure not to mention issues of doing business. Let’s not forget in a cloud scenario there is no one to blame, an external vendor can state, the lights are on, the engine was ready to receive workload unfortunately your application was not.

We’re beginning to see the starts of the process, the consolidation and commoditization of roles, the days of an application and infrastructure engineer, the guy that does everything (in the enterprise anyway) is reducing, your a Windows, a web site guy, a database guy, as we strip down the components of the infrastructure and virtualize them, we can remove the barriers to success. That a Windows server might cause as issues, not a problem deploy a virtual machine which I can re-deploy in minutes fixes that, or that my Citrix server might get slow due to an application issue or the workload involved, not a problem, deploy a Citrix farm and share the workload. Commoditize, simplify the infrastructure to it’s base components, rip and replace – the days of keeping a physical or virtual infrastructure until the end of time is over. Configure your application or workload to be grid or cloud compatible, where we buy in the capacity, the platform we need and you submit your tasks to deliver the functionality you need.

In all, I wonder how much our internal processes, the way we provision and charge out IT continues, are we not set to see a deeper integration of IT with the business units? A topic for thought, we’ll have to see, do check out the article though.

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