Every Tom and Jane in the business of IT talks about the cloud strategy these days. Some see it as panacea to managing a server room or a data center, others think it helps them reduce their dependence on irksome IT staff, yet others think Cloud is fashionable, and there’s need to adopt it, without thinking much about it.
I think many CIOs take this decision without a serious evaluation. The resultant consequence - often ill-thought out adoptions that do not bring in the right efficiencies.
It is a fact that there is no copybook definition of cloud computing.However, there’s clearly an infrastructure stack, and an application stack. Often, this application stack gets referred to as ‘service’ or by another much abused term ’SAAS’! Quite simply, the application uses the computing power of anonymous machines sitting in some invisible data center managed by someone else. Amazon is a typical example of this.
Coming to the applications now. Adopting organizations often get swayed by terms such as multi-tenancy of applications. Frankly, multi-tenancy comes at its own price. A multi-tenant application, mostly, cannot be tailor made to your requirements. Take it or leave it. Think about your apartment in a skyscraper. You cannot go grossly out of line with the rest of the building. You can maybe, change the colour of the walls if you like. It is standardized customization, if you so like.
That of course does not mean business processes cannot be in cloud. Business Process applications are rapidly maturing too. Force.com is an example of organizations that are moving forward in a rapid fashion.
That begs the question – should I, or, shouldn’t I. My suggestion is as follows:
- - Have your own reasons for moving to cloud.
- - Don’t think everyone on the cloud is on cloud nine.
- - Have your own starting point.
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