I just came across The Economist’s debate on cloud computing. Stephen Elop, President of Microsoft’s Business Division and Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce outline their conflicting views on the future development of cloud computing. After a short scroll, I hold Benioff’s comments for clearly the more biased. I respect what Salesforce has achieved but Benioff’s views are still somewhat utopian. Elop on the other hand manages to deliver a much more realistic and less biased point of view. I am eager to see how Microsoft will realign or reshape their Azure strategy in general. I’m starting to think that some experts have prematurely underestimated Microsoft as the cloud losers.
All in all it’s great to follow these ongoing discussions. I’m especially interested in whether the outlooks I conceived in early 2009 (in my second bachelor’s thesis on cloud computing) will prove to be true in 1 or 2 years’ time. My personal opinion is that this technology is certainly not the “breakthrough” it is marketed to be. Rather, it’s a logical evolutionary step for virtualization combined with better utilization of existing computing capacities. Yet cloud services and cloud technology do make a lot of sense for a variety of business tasks and maybe even more technical tasks. But I guess I’m still skeptical because the cloud hype has to run its natural course first. Eventually, more mature solutions will settle in.
The general development shows that the Cloud has a great future. Notwithstanding, it is currently raising numerous questions in regards to privacy, data protectin and data safety. For that reason the European Center for E-Commerce and Internet Law has pronounced it one of the major topics of its this year’s Securiy Enquette – http://e-center.eu/de/aktuell/ITRechtssicherheit/.
I also concur that the Cloud might have a great future, just as a single global currency might. The path is clear. However, the fact of the matter is that we’re not quite there yet. As you point out issues relating to security, lock-in effects but also valid cost efficiency questions could be raised for the time being.
Thus, I hold that at an operational level, managers and strategists at IT deparments should at this time not fall for all the hype and blindly embrace (=invest into) certain technologies or fully transfer to rely on single Cloud providers. Rather they should try to see opportunities for leveraging virtualization within their own resources to drive cloud-similar utilization rates and profit from similar economics.
Legislation always lags behind technology so what will be exciting to see is how will things look like after Microsoft on the one hand, and software based on open-source platforms such as Hadoop have established themselves in the Cloud.