Its raining and literally clouds are everywhere and at work too. Almost as Internet took shape and the web took over, the Cloud is no different. Literary thoughts apart The Cloud is taking over – It is Subversive, Invasive and soon will be Pervasive.
Cloud is changing the way enterprises strategize their IT infrastructure. Sooner than later an enterprise’s cloud infrastructure will define its global reach and presence, it will define the way they service their customers, how customers interact with them.
Be it a Retail organization, maintaining its global inventories and billing systems in the cloud or a Cable Company providing time-shifting and place-shifting services for its content through Cloud, Without Cloud, the sun won’t shine on businesses.
Where it draws a parallel to the advent of Internet is, it is leveling out the playing field between smaller organizations and Industry Mammoths. The Smaller companies now have access to high end, highly available, efficient and specific Servers and Applications, without the huge Capex that they earlier would have to shell out for the same infrastructure.
Cloud is lending another meaning to the word ‘mobility’ . With connectivity becoming faster and cheaper by the day (just read about Google launching its Superfast Broadband service), it would not be far when organizations run out of ‘pocket servers’ and all of us carry our own DRM protected content on our own ‘youtubes’. Compatibility and ‘Unknown file Format’ would be a thing of the past as you use the Cloud applications, without licensing them out on your own Personal Systems!!! Possibly our personal devices would carry only the Skins, while the applications run on the cloud and even more possibly we will not need to have personal devices because all devices would serve our personal content with the same fervor.
Storage is another area which is getting delimited by the Cloud. Imagine a virtual home in the cloud, where you store your own grocery store and it stores stuff from multiple of your retailers, each providing the item that you want, so you don’t have to search every time you want to buy , a video rack where all your fav movies and Soaps (minus commercials) are available, a library with all your favorite books (in the ebook form). They are all yours, at your tips, only that you never pay for all of them , only the ones that you use, won’t that be amazing. Welcome says the Cloud.
With so much content and applications on the cloud, Security is an aspect which will gain the maximum attention. The worry and the threat of exposure without a properly thought out Security Strategy is almost like baiting out all hackers to your cloud. On the other hand with all applications going to the cloud there would be only one place to secure and a uniform strategy and secure policies, organizations can feel more secure than ever.
Clouds are shaping up and for a change they are not dark. A lot is promised, and in small puffs they are all coming together!!