Is now a better time for Cloud computing?
In a climate of uncertainty many businesses have been wrestling with this question – and so have the team at CIC.
The emergence of the many-to-many cloud model creates a particular challenge for IT management teams. The explosion of cloud applications bought into the office by users is a security concern for them. Many of these apps are consumer not business grade solutions. To solve the security challenge, IT departments need to work with users to help improve the security stance.
Cloud brokerage from companies such as Gravitant enables IT departments to deploy cloud services where they are the most effective and that includes managing cost. More importantly it enables compliance and security to be part of the cloud deployment choices to protect data. One example of this working effectively would be IT departments identifying the use of a consumer-focused app and offering an enterprise approved alternative.
Ian Murphy, principal analyst at CIC, articulated CIC’s collective positioning on why “now” is good for Cloud in a blog posted on Virtualization Review’s website titled: Cloud Evolution: 5 Reasons Why “Now” Is Good
From his article he argues the point:
“In effect we have reached the tipping point of hybrid cloud computing which opens up new opportunities. For some companies it is about using cloud-based applications to consume data that is held on-premises. This need to hold onto data is not driven by fear of cloud, as many were accused of in the early days, but by regulators who are concerned about privacy. A quick look at the state of privacy and lack of trust between the EU and US shows just how those regulations have come about.”
However there is more to consider if organisations are looking to take advantage of the cloud model. As Ian rightly says in that same article:
“The next generation of applications need to be written to run in the cloud taking advantage of cloud architectures and capabilities. For this to occur it is time to put aside old methodologies and monolithic application frameworks that result in a slower pace of delivery and often more complex interdependent code bases that will certainly be more prone to errors.”
Software development moved from being on-premises development teams to an outsourced and complex process almost two decades ago. Cloud helps reduce much of the complexity and improve the speed of development.
There are new mantras for the software team working in the cloud: reinvention is not a game changer, the business and operational outcome should be paramount, experience and engagement is contextual and goes beyond the visual and security must be seamless and constant. Ownership of the relationship means more than that of an organisation’s IT estate.
There was, however, a sixth driver missing from Ian’s CIC positioning article on why now is an even better time to be investing in the Cloud. It is the abundance of tooling support, with some of the newer products focusing on engaging a broader audience base and leveraging the behind the scenes plumbing and heavy lifting that the cloud model engenders.
The missing driver: No. 6 – New tooling support
Cloud providers are delivering application platforms that allow developers to concentrate on what they do best – write applications that deliver new innovations and capabilities required by the user audience. They remove the need to manage the underlying platforms and infrastructure or worry about issues such as security patching which is at the heart of so many security problems.
In addition to the increased support within traditional development tools for building cloud applications there is a new breed of tools that run in the cloud. These are development environments which allow developers to develop in the browser. For example, Cloud9 is an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that supports 40 different programming languages including C++, Python, Perl, Ruby, Scala.
The traditional big IDEs – Open Source Eclipse and Microsoft’s Visual Studio – have cloud based versions that are not as feature rich as their desktop counterparts but which are highly usable. Then there are tools that target specific capabilities such as IBM’s Swift development environment which is ideal for developers that wish to reuse their Apple iOS programming skills to write code that runs in the IBM cloud.
Want to know the other 5 reasons?
To read the other five reasons for why “now” is good for Cloud computing, head over to Ian’s article at Virtualisation Review.
This blog first appeared on www.creativeintellectuk.com and republished with permission.
