Thursday 9 December 2010

A Year in the Clouds - How Cloud Computing Exceeded the Hype

We have now reached that time of year when the great and the good partake in the festive tradition of crystal ball gazing, as they predict the IT industry’s future trends for the next twelve months.
Over the next three weeks or so we will be deluged with various top tens, who will move, who will shake, who’ll hit tech heaven with the next iPad and who will reach tech hell with the next Sega Dreamcast.

It was about this time last year that seemingly every list published featured cloud computing as the number one game changer, the one trend that would have the greatest impact on the delivery of IT services. Some went as far as to predict that cloud should be viewed as the single most evolutionary computing development since the web itself was established. Not many argued against the list compilers rankings, but many viewed the prediction with a healthy pinch of cynicism.
It was Winston Churchill who once famously stated that “It is a mistake to try to look too far ahead. The chain of destiny can only be grasped one link at a time.”

We find ourselves one year on, with all of us having been bestowed with that marvellous gift of hindsight, and are now in a position to judge whether the soothsayers were on the money or whether Churchill’s cautionary note rings true.

So in 2010, did we reach for the cloud? The answer has to be a resounding yes, with the reality matching, and quite possibly exceeding, the hype.

Earlier this week, Angus MacSween, industry veteran and CEO of the UK’s iomart group plc told Dow Jones “I have never seen something happen quite as quickly as this. Six months ago around one-fifth to one-tenth of enquiries from potential customers related to cloud computing; now it is roughly nine out of ten.” He also stated that the attitude of firms’ IT departments has changed. “Whereas once they were reluctant to cede control of new projects, now they look to outsource to the cloud from the word go. We are witnessing a paradigm shift away from traditional on-premise models to the cloud”.
http://cloudcomputing.sys-con.com/node/1636886
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