It's where many companies think that IT is headed. Away from the old applications program on the desktop or in the data centre, and towards a world where applications and data storage become services. There are lots of good IT reasons why the cloud computing trend might be good for users but there are also very good reasons why the trend is good for network operators. Now, big telcos are getting involved.
Microsoft last month announced elements of its Windows Azure cloud computing strategy, a scalable, hosted service platform layered with framework services specially tuned to application developers. It moves application creation off the desktop and application hosting out of the corporate IT data centre.
Cloud computing is the popular parlance for such offerings, though somewhat synonymous with Internet computing, on-demand services, hosted services, utility computing and software-as-a-service (SaaS). “There’s about two dozen other terms I can think of if you want them,” said Steve Crawford, vice president of marketing at SaaS firm Jamcracker.
Utility computing has less to do with applications being hosted and more to do with the use of entire virtual servers, and SaaS is more focused on third-party hosting of individual applications, but cloud computing and its relations are basically a realisation about something we have all been hearing for about 20 years.
“Remember when Sun Microsystems said ‘the network is the computer’? Well, that’s exactly where we are right now,” Crawford said.
Azure puts Microsoft even more in the position of being a steel mill for forging applications, but it isn’t the only company with a steel mill sitting in the Internet cloud. Amazon and Google have similar strategies, and Salesforce.com and Jamcracker have been at the SaaS game for years.
The latter two companies emerged from the application service provider trend of a decade ago, which saw many start-ups rise around the idea that both enterprises and traditional service providers were ready to have fundamental applications hosted by third parties or online. But most of those companies failed, including, in a way, Microsoft, whose 2001 Hailstorm .Net hosted services announcement was pelted from all sides by potential customers and observers concerned about the trust and privacy issues of having the “Evil Empire” host applications.
That offering’s remarkably unmarketable name turned out to be a pretty apt one, and Microsoft eventually pushed it into the shadows, but elements of Hailstorm are clear in the new services framework that sits atop Azure.
Cloud computing is emerging amid a much more welcoming atmosphere—that is to say, a much more foreboding one for companies facing various operational challenges.
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