It’s not silver but green bucks people are after. Aren't they? Even Gartner has an "IT Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies" which basically means that innovative solutions like Cloud Computing go through an unavoidable cycle of hype before masses truly understand their worth. There are many such examples in our short but glorious history to name a few dot com era and webservices are top of the recall.
It is not that such innovative solutions (dot com and webservices included) do not have much value. Only these ideas did not have much application (and thus appreciation) at the time when these were hyped to be so. Today we have uncountable solutions people had dreamt of during the dot com burst; webservices have truly enabled SOA and enabled distributed solutions to integrate (who remembers EDI and other integration ideas?). But webservices did not result into a major infrastructure by itself as was prophesied some time back (public UDDI directories are limited to some trivial services).
Public cloud computing, in my belief, has similar fate in store.
There are many things going for Cloud. Some of these are:
Managing bottom lines: ever decreasing overheads is an everyday dream of CFO's and people managing bottom lines. This unquenchable thrust will definitely fuel any idea which can promise to reduce the overheads and operating costs for corporates. But this is only till the time when somebody either brings a better idea or proves that it’s not safe for business.
Managing Complexities (Abstraction?): Abstraction runs as the common thread in most our services and solutions. A cloud completely hides the complexities of infrastructure and technology changes from the end users and owners. Well done!
Availability: 24/7 availability of the infrastructure and services would be a must have feature.
Some of the following may stop an all-out embracing of Public Clouds:
Security: Not only at cloud level but also at source code level will be a mandatory aspect. With more valuable data moving into clouds it will be a prime target for hackers and phishing community. Mare thought is jittery for anyone and would be so for the corporates.
Conflict of interests: It’s a complex world out there. One of the investors of cloud provider could on board of your competitor. Though it could be rare but it still is a probability.
Reduced costs: Over a period of time hardware costs have tendency to head south. This along with off shoring to cheaper destinations will rob public clouds of cost advantages.
Market size: There are already some magical numbers pertaining to market size for public clouds but these needs to be evaluated and at best taken with a pinch of salt. As natural and democratic phenomena ideas/solutions with smaller market size receive small part of R&D spends and this in turn scuttles the innovation.
Private clouds on the other hands would be more acceptable by the corporates who make bigger chunk of the global IT spend. Thus we will have clouds but best ROI would be achieved by the bigger players within their enterprises just like web services. This would take away the “utility” tag from clouds and Infrastructure as a service (IAAS).
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