Why There Will Be No Year Of The Cloud
By Dwayne Melancon, Tripwire’s VP of Corporate and Business Development
I recently got an email talking about “the year of the cloud.”
I call shenanigans.
You see, I remember back in the olden days (back in the 1980’s) when magazines and industry luminaries would regularly declare each year to be “the year of the LAN.”
And none of them ever were “the year of the LAN.”
I think the cloud is something that will become an entrenched part of business gradually - not in a burst of glory. Why? Here are a few of the reasons I see:
“Let someone else go first.”
Before vast herds of businesses go running to the cloud (a buzzy term for a technology system many IT execs don’t yet understand), they will want to see that others have done it an not gotten burned.
This is classic bell curve stuff - a few will do it, but it will be a while before the majority of the IT orgs use the cloud in any significant way.
“We’ll get there…”
It’s a well-known fact that people move away from pain and toward pleasure (at least most people do).
I think people will move to cloud-based infrastructure and services in the course of normal business changes, not just for the sake of moving to the cloud. That alone will make this a gradual, deliberate shift.
“We’re not quite sure how to use it yet…”
Many organizations will need some kind of a ‘killer app’ to help them a) understand the value of cloud-based capabilities, and b) mobilize the budget and force of will to change habits, culture, tools, skills, etc.
Hype cannot always move a nation
Before the repeated “year of the LAN” declarations, I saw another set of declarations telling me the US was going to move to the metric system (this was a big topic in my Weekly Reader newsletter in grade school).
Has that happened? No, we still use non-metric units for most everything in the US. Do I wish it would happen? Yes.
This shows me that inertia is a powerful thing, and large-scale change is hard to drive.
On the plus side, we don’t have to change road signs and clothing sizes to move to the cloud, so I think it will take far less time than the US’s move to the metric system.
Don’t get me wrong - I think the cloud (we’ll end up calling it something else, I bet) will eventually become pervasive just like LANs and other types of networks.
We’ll eventually overcome most of these objections and move to service-oriented, off-premise infrastructure & applications. It just won’t happen overnight.
Now, I just have to wait and see if I’m right. What do you think?
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Dwayne Melançon joined Tripwire in 2000 and serves as Tripwire’s Vice President of Corporate and Business Development, where he leads the company’s strategic partnerships and alliances. In previous positions at the company, Dwayne was vice president of Professional Services and Support, Information Systems, and Marketing. Prior to joining Tripwire, Dwayne was Vice President of Operations for DirectWeb, Inc., where he was responsible for product management, logistics, electronic supplier integration, customer support, information systems, infrastructure development, and other business operations. Before DirectWeb, he ran Pan-European Support for Symantec Corporation, managed support for several of Symantec’s leading product lines, and spearheaded the development of tools and processes.
Tripwire helps over 6,500 enterprises worldwide reduce security risk, attain compliance and increase operational efficiency across virtual and physical environments. With its industry leading configuration assessment and change auditing software solutions, IT organizations achieve and maintain configuration control. Tripwire is headquartered in Portland, Ore. with offices worldwide.
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Comments
3 Comments on Why There Will Be No Year Of The Cloud
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Mike Meikle on
Wed, 16th Dec 2009 2:01 pm
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Heather Toll on
Thu, 17th Dec 2009 5:40 am
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uberVU - social comments on
Thu, 17th Dec 2009 1:32 pm
I agree with you sir. Most firms will be unwilling to spend the money to move their infrastructure over to the “cloud” without a serious business case. Besides the fact that security in the “cloud” is still way too ambivalent for sensitive data.
In my view, it’s vendor generated hype. The technology will mature and it will become an available option when planning corporate technology infrastructure.
Your point that I most agree with is hoping we end up calling it something besides “the cloud.” I think that silly-sounding term might be one of the things preventing businesses from taking it seriously.
Yet, it seems that more of the new applications that businesses use are web-based, particularly for marketing. All the social networks, Flickr, YouTube, and e-mail services like iContact are all web-based apps that are growing in popularity for business use.
Our company is moving toward providing hosted SAAS apps for our clients, but we have our work cut out for us in helping our clients understand what “this cloud stuff” is all about and WHY it will benefit them.
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