So, you’ve built your Cloud or perhaps at least built the case for the use of Cloud; private, public, and hybrid; so what do you next? What are those next steps?
Perhaps you’ve even got some ‘Lighthouse Deployments’; some early projects running in the Cloud? How do take your Cloud mainstream? Or do you just sit round and self-congratulate yourselves for the next six months?
Actually, what have you implemented? Have you perhaps built a vBlock infrastructure? A Flexpod? So what applications are you running in this Cloud? The low-hanging fruit such as email is popular but really have you actually done Cloud at this point? All you have done is moved an application into a virtualised infrastructure.
Now there are some significant benefits in taking existing workloads and virtualising them but is that enough?
It seems that a great deal of focus on the journey to Cloud is still on the underlying infrastructure and a very low-level of infrastructure at that. Putting Big Data to one side, where are the applications and workloads which can be genuinely said to be Cloud?
If we continue to simply take existing workloads and just shift them into a more dynamic infrastructure; we risk missing the transformative possibilities of Cloud. We miss the possibility of using a new generation of applications to redefine process and business.
The beauty of the PC was not that it just brought computing power to the desktop but it brought new applications with it; from the Office applications that we all love to hate to the browser which we all love to hate; it has transformed the way we do business and our lives.
The infrastructure to support Cloud is mostly there or within reach but the applications which define Cloud and change business and lives; these are mostly missing, certainly if you move outside of the social applications and Big Data.
And even migrating existing workloads to the Cloud is often a simple lift and shift with little redevelopment of the workload to take advantage of the possibilities or even the realities of Cloud. Workloads are not designed and architected to take advantage of elastic resource which might vanish at any moment.
The plumbing is done; now it’s time to heat the house.
