Margaret Walker, Ryan Koop, Patrick Kerpan, Fred Hoch, Edmund Sutcliffe, Krishnan Subramanian, James Elwood, Chad Lawler, and Patricia Seybold.
Exclusive Viewpoint: Cloud Still Has a Long Way to Come Chad Lawler Director, Consulting Services, Cloud Computing at Hitachi Consulting It’s very interesting to look ahead and try to anticipate where the puck is going. The truth is that what Werner Vogels has stated about where we are in the “maturity curve” is absolutely true – that even with the progress we’ve made, we are very early in the cloud evolution. We want instant gratification with a solution that fits all of our needs, but we’re not there yet. We’re certainly not at the point where true utility computing is a reality. Here is an example: most cloud vendors say they offer pay-per-use functionality, when really they’re offering pay-per-allocation. You allocate a small, medium, large, or extra-large compute size, server memory, and a certain amount of storage. You pay for what you allocate, not what you use. When you allocate 10TB of storage on AWS S3 and do not use all of it, you still pay for the 10TB allocated. In order to have scalable storage you still have to pay to allocate it. The idea of utility computing is still very relevant, interesting, and appealing to businesses, particularly when you get into the potential for dynamic, hybrid cloud. With hybrid cloud, you can get to daydreaming about moving workloads on the fly to the cheapest or fastest cloud. The truth is, that just isn’t a reality today. It’s coming, however, as you can see with recent releases by leading cloud providers that enable basic hybrid functionality. However, the standards are not there yet and clouds are proprietary. It is very complex to move a traditional application from your data center to a public cloud and back without detailed knowledge of the application. Plus, there are still many integration, performance, data consistency, and security concerns, and not every application is a fit for the cloud, at least today. Cloud will continue to evolve toward a hybrid, utility-compute cloud model, but it is going to take a long tim
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