NOT too long ago, a Singaporean schoolboy wrote a drawing program for the iPhone to help his younger sisters draw on the touch-screen using their fingers. Called Doodle Kids, it was downloaded nearly half-million times in three months from Apple’s App Store. The nine-year-old boy’s got IT!
Technology isn’t about building and maintaining infrastructure. It’s about using IT to solve problems.
Yet, nearly seven in 10 enterprise IT dollars are spent on maintenance, and in a distributed computing environment, as much as 85 per cent of IT capacity can remain idle.
This is not to reduce the importance of maintaining infrastructure, but the true value of IT lies in providing users with information that they need to make critical business decisions.
Today’s mobile, interconnected workforce places new demands on business application delivery. To meet such challenges, enterprises typically over-provide computing capacity and network resources, leading to idle excess capacity.
This needs changing.
Enter cloud computingThe combination of the Internet, broadband networks, virtualisation technology and increasingly powerful commodity computing resources creates the conditions for the next development in IT – cloud computing. The aim is to harness pools of computing resources to give enterprises access to IT infrastructure without incurring large capital investment. Cloud computing removes the need to over-engineer infrastructure. With it, enterprises can buy resources as needed and when usage peters off, the resources can be turned off, offering more flexibility. When you only pay for what you use, the economics of providing IT resources changes dramatically. Available on a metered basis, IT expenditure shifts from capital expenditure to operating expenditure.
If enterprises see IT as a utility, then continued investment in infrastructure when options exist, is like operating your own power station to get electricity. IT is an information utility. Growing adoption of virtualisation will advance cloud computing and its promise of selfservice, on-demand usage and portability.
Research firm Gartner expects enterprises to buy as much as 40 per cent of their IT infrastructure as a service by 2011. And that at least one-third of business application software spending will be as service subscription, instead of product licence, by 2012.
The move to cloud computing won’t happen dramatically. Rather, it will be evolutionary as enterprises get used to freeing applications from being tied to specific infrastructure.
Advisory services firm Merrill Lynch sees the global market for cloud computing to reach US$95 billion (RM327 billion), or about 12 per cent of software deployed in the world, in the next five years.
Local prospectsCloud computing is, of course, no panacea for all economic ills.
But it does offer businesses a new way to provision infrastructure and computing services as well as a compelling financial argument by freeing up capital otherwise locked in physical equipment.
The Malaysian Government is quick to recognise the benefits of cloud computing. Earlier this year, research and development agency Mimos joined the global Open Cirrus initiative, establishing the local chapter of a cloud computing research and open source testbed.
The Government is looking to eventually roll out a national cloud computing platform to deploy services throughout the country, focusing on enabling services through software, security frameworks and mobile interactivity as well as testing new cloud tools and methodologies.
The open source, collaborative model of developing and consuming software will be pivotal in cloud computing, In fact, open source and cloud computing are a natural fit, not least because of the inherent cost advantages. As cloud providers grow, given their scale, the cost of buying proprietary software will be large in business calculations.
More importantly, communitydriven open source software makes sure that cloud computing is open standards-based and interoperable.
Openness delivers choice. It makes it possible for enterprises to switch cloud computing providers or architectures when new business needs arise.
Conclusion
In the United States, where the cloud computing wave is gaining momentum, nearly all major cloud providers such as Amazon use open source software. Demand for open standards and development transparency will push the adoption of open source in cloud computing and in doing so, redefine the way software is developed and consumed.
The on-demand cloud computing model will transform the way in which enterprises use IT. Freed from the time and cost constraints of implementing and maintaining underlying IT infrastructure, enterprises can go back to creating business solutions that they need.
In their continuous search for business advantage, enterprises need to re-emphasise the information in IT.
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