1. 5 Cloud Services that Are Changing IT for Businesses
By Bill Dodson
August 2016
Cloud services to organizations provide information technology (IT)
economies of scale that promise to dramatically lower the cost of IT
infrastructure maintenance and development of new products and services.
Cloud technology relies on the consolidation and coordination of thousands
of computer servers that can hold anything from operating systems through
software applications and data.
Cloud vendors already offer three services that are already transforming the
way IT models support organizations: Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS),
Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS). Two
deployment offerings provide companies and governments flexibility and
scalability to meet their evolving needs: Private and Public leasing
arrangements of Cloud assets as well as a combination of each.
History Rhyming
The overwhelming majority of organizations throughout the world have
invested heavily in acquiring and managing their own IT hardware, software
and staffs to develop and maintain it all. Cloud services offer a way for
companies to consolidate the investments with those of other organizations
to dramatically reduce operational costs and to gain a level of IT flexibility
and scalability previously only dreamed of. Organizations -- including
governments -- find themselves at a historic juncture similar to that of the
consolidation of electricity generation a hundred years ago.
Until the end of World War I it was as common for companies to run their
own steam-driven electricity generators on premises or from generators less

2. than a mile from their buildings as it is now for companies to maintain their
own IT infrastructure. Companies had to manage coal supplies, electricals,
and staff to literally keep the lights on. Economics and government
regulations forced consolidation of operations and standards that paved the
way for America in particular to become a global industrial powerhouse.
Cloud services will speed a new era of IT that will include the Internet of
Things (IoT), virtual reality, self-learning artificial intelligence, and more.
Silver linings
Cloud vendors like Amazon, Google, Salesforce.com, Hewlett-Packard and
more provide broad platforms on which other organizations can rest their IT
departments. With the growing sophistication of Cloud technologies comes a
differentiation of services to support the largest organizations and individuals
alike:
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provides the hardware and operating
systems IT departments need to host generic software applications like MS
Office and applications customized to meet their organization’s unique
requirements; for instance, specialized budgeting software and order
processing applications.
The advantage of going into the Cloud for IaaS is the technology takes the
guesswork out of budgeting for items like server build-outs and supporting
operating system support. Instead, organizations can scale up the amount of
storage they need when the time comes, and rapidly reduce infrastructure
support as they retire legacy systems.
Amazon Web Services (AWS), Rackspace.com and Gogrid.com are popular
IaaS providers.
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3. Platform as a Service (PaaS) provides software developers coding and test
beds, automatically updated programming language and documentation they
need to rapidly produce new applications. The Google App Engine, Microsoft
Windows Azure and SalesForce’s Force.com all offer the tools for rapid
prototyping and roll-out of software products.
A downside of investing in one of these environments, however, is that
developers become tied into the vendor’s development, test, and
deployment environments -- not just locked into the programming language.
Software as a Service (SaaS) offers traditional desktop software applications
from vendors to users through the internet. Typically, none, if any, of the
application resides on local computers (beyond cookies that identify access
and preferences). One of the most popular SaaS offerings is SalesForce.com,
which automates sales marketing activities and facilitates customer service.
Microsoft has redesigned its Office suite of products for access through the
internet, with project management offerings such as GroupCamp and Zoho
Projects. Many of the products allow users to work offline, then sync their
work with cloud-based documents.
As You Like It
Organizations can lease server space on a private, public or hybrid basis.
Private leases involve organizations taking over entire racks of physical
server space. Private options are the most expensive and most secure of the
options.
Public options involve renting space on physical servers in “virtual” slices.
Hybrid solutions meld the two private and public configurations to provide
organizations the best of both worlds: the security of “ring-fenced” physical
servers for sensitive applications and date; and the scalability of virtual
servers as demand for storage capacity grows and shrinks.
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4. Known Unknowns
The integration of cloud computing into IT operations is as inevitable as the
consolidation of electricity production a hundred years ago. In the same way
that the Ford factory, for instance, may have had to have its own coal
furnaces and steam engines to drive electricity production for its plants, it
would also have had the staff and services to deliver coal, shovel coal, and
clean the furnaces, to name just a few of the jobs that have gone by the
wayside.
Similarly, IT organizations will have to dramatically restructure themselves:
co-locating large staffs will become a thing of the past as cloud computing
permits remote rapid development and deployment of software from any
location; tech support will be increasingly outsourced to shared service
providers; and maintenance staff for legacy systems will rapidly become
obsolete as new systems come online faster with the expectation of
becoming disposable more quickly.
IT departments will indeed be seeing electrifying times ahead with the
advent of Cloud computing.
© 2016 Bill Dodson
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