[LINK] Cloud Computing Services in Australia?

Bernard Robertson-Dunn brd at iimetro.com.au
Mon Nov 7 14:22:20 AEDT 2011


On 7/11/2011 11:25 AM, grove at zeta.org.au wrote:
> What is conncerning me, as someone directly in the cone of influence
> of "The Cloud", and as one that watches restructures end people's careers on a
> seemingly more common basis, is that it is being used as an
> "operational reason" for the reduction of onshore IT jobs and outsourcing of
> systems admins, and so on.
>
<the rest snipped>

<personal opinion>
Rachel,

My view is that "The Cloud" is not so much a replacement technology as a 
new way of structuring technology.

The two major aspects of cloud technology are
a) virtualisation
b) standardisation

Virtualisation has taken off in a big way in IT departments, the major 
benefit being to increase the average utilisation of servers and to 
allow for rapid resource allocation to/from applications. The Cloud just 
happen to make a big use of it.

Standardisation is the elephant in the room. If you look at two of the 
larger players in the field, Amazon and Microsoft, their standardisation 
in the infrastructure  architecture space is new and different from any 
sort of current infrastructure or platform models. In other words, the 
cloud providers are saying: change your application architecture to suit 
our product/solution/service and you can use our product/solution/service.

This means that moving existing applications to a cloud environment is 
not a simple case of moving files. It's a complex re-write.

There are some specific areas where The Cloud may have a significant 
impact on enterprise ICT, email and web-hosting being examples.

The upshot is that existing ICT environments will continue, maybe 
gradually shrinking in absolute terms, but definitely shrinking in 
relative terms as new applications use The Cloud. A bit like the 
mainframe world. There's many a mainframe systems programmer and COBOL 
programmer still out there maintaining and modifying existing systems.

The IT department is not going to disappear real soon now.

</personal opinion>

-- 

Regards
brd

Bernard Robertson-Dunn
Canberra Australia
email:   brd at iimetro.com.au
website: www.drbrd.com



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