Why the cloud may require you to learn multiple words for snow

Cloud is at the center of a convergence trend that is impacting people across all of ICT. This convergence is breaking down the walls that separated the traditional silo’s of IT, networking, storage and security. But with this breaking down of the walls we also need to better understand the subtleties of each others domains in more details.

A famous urban legend is that eskimo’s have many words for snow, as it makes sense to – if you spend your whole day in snow – to distinguish the subtle and not so subtle differences.

Similar in IT, where others simply refer to IT as IT , the people living in IT tend to distiguish between operations, development, support (helpdesk), testing, portfolio management, information and master data management, etc. etc.

And the same is true for networking, where others see the network (or even the internet) as a homogenous blob, the people running and managing the network distinguish many parts and layers, seperate it out into core and non core and many other subtleties.

The cloud (together with its enbaling peer: software defined functionality) is rapidly changing that. Anyone who tried to set up a simple IT fuction like cloud compute at one of the many cloud IaaS providers will have noticed how many of the configuration questions are network related (and not trivial to answer).

The challenge for network folk is slightly different as more of their traditional network functions are no longer implemented in or on dedicated network kit (their kit) but run on general purpose compute infrastructure as software. SDN (software defined networking) and NFV (network function virtalisation) are two of the main drivers in this area.

But even a bigger driver to learn and understand each other languages is the fact that the clouds inherent “as a service” model is driving a move from beeing organized along horizontal or functional layers (network, storage, compute, applications, support) to beeing organized around services (CRM, Collaboration, Supply Chain, etc.). These services (typically implemented as SaaS services) namely include their own implementation of all the underlying layers inside their service.

In theory (and often in practice) these services hide the underlying complexities from their end users, but often not from the teams supporting or offering (for example in the case of “private SaaS”) these services. These teams will need a more holistic and less silood view of the whole stack than they had in the past.

And that will mean we will all need to speak and understand the languages and words that are used in the layers that used to be foreign to our own areas of expertise.

At some point we may even develop a simplified high level language that goes across the domains. A bit like Esperanto or like Fangalo, the language that miners used in South Africa, a mix of words from Dutch, English and the about 500 local languages, with a simplified grammar, no distinction between past, present and other tenses and a vocabulary of only about 2000 words. It could be learned quit rapidly and allowed people to work in cross functional and cross national teams within a very short time.

In the cloud we could have such a “digital” language (or skill set) for people working on the cloud (whose tasks will be more technical than traditional business tasks) , but still a lot less technical (and less specialised) than the task of the people working behind the cloud (engineering the very complex cloud engines and networks that power the cloud).

Cloud for Business

Earlier this month the Times ran its regular "Cloud for Business" insert, in which I was asked to write a column on "Cloud for Digital Business" (see full text here). For reference I included below the piece on "The future of Cloud Computing" that it ran in an earlier edition. An item called:

Cloud Spotting is the Shape of Things to Come.When asked to write a column with an ambitious title like “The future of the cloud”, it is a good idea to look first at where cloud is at the moment and to realise that it is still very early days. Today, of the $2.7 trillion that global business spends annually on IT, just 4.8 per cent is spent on cloud computing.

The cloud’s penetration of the world of business is considerably less than its penetration of our daily lives. As consumers we get most of our news, information and increasingly entertainment through cloud services. In fact, the consumer industry has become the major driver of IT innovation. Many years ago, IT innovation was largely driven by defence spending, later by space exploration and then, for many years, the best place to see new innovative products in action, such as colour laptops, projectors and colour printers, was inside the offices of large enterprises.

How different things are now. The largest screens with the highest resolutions, the fastest network connections, “premium” tablets and the best connected mobiles are probably the ones you use at home. Even in large data centres, innovation is now largely driven by consumer-oriented organisations, such as Facebook, with its open computer server design initiative or Google with its MapReduce approach to making sense of very large sets of information. Many enterprises are still getting used to the idea that they are no longer in the driving seat. Where in the past they typically expected vendors to come running to deliver exactly what they asked for, they now need to figure out how standard offerings based on consumer-facing innovations can be used inside their business.

The cloud is not the only consumer-driven innovation businesses need to make sense of. It is joined by a nexus of new digital forces, including the social, mobile and information, or big data, forces. These offer truly new capabilities when combined. For example, businesses can now connect more directly with their customers using social and mobile technology. This provides huge amounts of customer information that can be analysed to enable businesses to communicate in a more relevant and useful way – a change facilitated by the use of software and IT infrastructure in the cloud.

Another element shaping the future of the cloud is the increasing importance of sharing content and knowledge across organisations. The value of using cloud services, such as Google Maps and LinkedIn, comes from sharing more information (on roads, traffic, people, skills) than individual companies could ever hope to collect or keep up to date in their own internal systems. For many years businesses sought efficiencies and gained competitive advantage by integrating and co-ordinating their internal processes better. Now we see increasingly that, driven by big data, future efficiencies lie in optimising processes across multiple organisations. This leads to “social collaboration networks” between businesses, similar to what a cloud application like Facebook did for individuals.

However, by saying that the cloud is especially valuable for doing things that were not possible before, or at least not practicable or affordable, we make predicting the future of the cloud a lot harder. Ironically, uncertainty about the future is also one of the main reasons for using the cloud. When a business is uncertain whether one thousand or one million customers will watch its latest webcast or play its latest game, the elasticity of the cloud makes it an ideal platform because a business can rapidly scale up its IT capacity to meet its needs at the time and then scale it back when it is no longer required.

Similarly, when organisations are uncertain whether a new software implementation will be a tremendous success (leading to all divisions in all countries using the whole platform on a daily basis) or a modest failure (leading to a few divisions using some parts of the software in a couple of countries), it is better not to invest up-front but to “pay as you go”. An example of a company using this is game provider Zynga, which uses cloud computing extensively when launching new games, but then brings established games back in-house when many of the uncertainties about usage and capacity requirements have been resolved. It is this agility, the ability to “turn on a sixpence”, not cost-savings, that is the main driver for the cloud's use by businesses today and it is likely to remain an important driver in future.

Using the cloud should not be a goal in itself: it should be a means of achieving specific benefits. As a result, business cloud strategies, today and in the future, must be driven by higher-level objectives, such as reducing lead times or improving customer experience by delivering core services through the cloud. Cloud adoption should not be driven by artificial IT metrics, such as aiming to have a certain percentage of applications running in the cloud by 2015. Selecting projects potentially suitable for the cloud is a question of weighing the benefits against the risks. If the risks of using the cloud are very high and the benefits relatively low – for instance, when migrating stable and predictable yet crucial workloads that already run efficiently internally – it may be something to avoid.

Conversely, if benefits are high and risks low, as for example in big data modelling and analytics where tens of thousands of processors run for short periods to simulate or predict customer behaviour, using the cloud may be a “no-brainer”, allowing a business to pay only for what it needs, and to avoid overheads and maintenance during times when this capability is not required.

Risk, however, is not a constant. Just as Japanese manufacturers pursuing just-in-time and Lean manufacturing concepts refused to accept that the changeover time between products on a production line was a constant and so actively worked to reduce them, consumers and cloud providers should work on reducing the risks, both real and perceived, associated with cloud computing. There are many ways to do this.

Concerns about the security of information held in the cloud can be allayed by applying technologies, such as encryption or by agreeing to more transparency about the physical location in which data is stored. It is also important to realise that confidence in the cloud will grow naturally as users and providers gain more experience. Passengers of the first airlines needed to be quite brave as there was no track record that warranted trust in pilots and their equipment.

Trust increased as the industry learned from initial disasters and actively improved service – you can also expect to see both disasters and subsequent improvements with the cloud. Not all the cloud will be as regulated as the airline business, but some cloud services could well be more regulated than they are today, for example in privacy-sensitive areas like healthcare.

The cloud changes attitudes to IT more than it changes IT itself. The concept of delivery “as a service”, so central to cloud computing, will lead to IT organisation acting as an intermediary within business where managing the consumption of external cloud services will be as important as managing the delivery of internal services – leading to a future that is facilitated by, but not determined by, the cloud.

Author: G. Petri Source: Racontuer - Times instert