Getting the right cloud by carol wilson

Views and Opinions on Green IT (Aug 3 2009) Cloud Computing

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   As much as we all rail against hype in the world of technology, the truth is hype plays a significant role – it draws attention to innovations and enables those that ultimately succeed to get the focus, funding and market power they need. Gartner realized this years ago in defining the hype cycle.

   But the down side of hype is that it often renders once-meaningful terms into clichéd marketing gimmicks, which is what cloud computing seems headed for. That’s why I found Simon Wardley’s 14-minute video, “Cloud Computing – Why IT Matters,” so valuable. As explained by Wardley, cloud computing isn’t a product nor does it fit neatly into any one of the 67 definitions you can find on the Internet. Rather, it is a transformation of IT from a product-based operation to a service-based economy, driven, as Wardley says, by economic, cultural and technological conditions.

   In the context of green data center technology, acceptance of cloud computing as the norm is important because it best sets in place the foundation on which other priorities can be established. Those priorities will vary from business to business. Everyone will be concerned with costs, to be sure, and reliability will also be a common factor. But in a utility business, these are easily measured and compared.

   The bigger priorities are those that can define an enterprise, and concern for the environment fits into that bucket. To date, U.S. companies don’t have the financial incentives at work elsewhere in the developed world for proactively reducing their carbon footprint, but those may be coming. U.S. businesses, however, like businesses everywhere, do have a financial incentive to adopt technology in the most cost-effective way possible

   The move to cloud computing, or computing as a utility, represents a transitional period and thus an opportunity to get things done right from the beginning. And getting it right means exploring the most environmentally friendly means of managing a major transition for all IT operations.

   
   

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