360°IT Blog

Without a shadow of a doubt, the biggest buzzword in the IT industry today is the cloud. Everything is cloud. You’ll be met with disdain if you are forced to admit you are not yet ‘on the cloud’ in some way.
 
In fact, the cloud isn’t all that new. It’s just a way of saying we are going to be increasingly thinking in terms of the network, and will be much less inclined to run all sorts of hardware and software locally ourselves. Of course, we have been moving steadily in that direction for years. Just look at telephony: we all used to have an answering machine at home for our landline, but now we just use our mobile voicemail ‘in the cloud’. It would look pretty strange if we all had to lug around an answering machine to listen to those messages. And we will increasingly use ‘network’ applications, which do not require us to know anything about the systems behind them. Seen in this way, the cloud is no revolution, simply the continued evolution of network thinking.
 
Nevertheless, many of us still have a certain nostalgic desire to hold on to a real device, as well as a need to be able to see our own data centre run with our own server and our own software. If cloud evolution continues, then a data centre is soon likely to become a collector’s item. Many IT people today find that hard to cope with. After all, we have grown up with the smell of computer hardware and we want to keep it as close to us as possible.
 
The next generation of users sees things differently. Consider email. Generation Y finds it much more convenient to use Google's Gmail than their company email, and prefers the ease of MSN and Facebook to internal company systems for communicating with one another. Even storing and exchanging documents is a lot easier for them with Google Docs than using the company intranet.
 
If IT departments aren’t careful, we are soon going to be overtaken by the cloud. After all, it's about much more than simply outsourcing hardware and software to the network. It also offers a huge amount of online applications that are eagerly being used by internal staff. Prohibiting its use would not be wise, and would without doubt cause Generation Y to bristle. The definition of work for a Generation Y user is: ‘a short period of the day during which I have to use the old technology’.
 
As IT managers today, we shouldn’t try to put on the brakes. On the contrary, we need to show users the way to the proper applications in the cloud and the right way to use them. Attempting to block this would be completely wrong, but it does mean we need to do our own experimenting, testing and assessment. The cloud is certainly more than just hype, but if we aren’t careful it could become our greatest obstacle.

Peter Hinssen is one of Europe's foremost technology trend experts and co-founder/MD of Across Technology.

Tags:

cloud computing, SaaS, enterprise 2.0, web 2.0, web applications, PaaS, network thinking, Generation Y

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