The driving forces of Cloud Computing

Besides the overall 4th wave trend mentioned in the last blog, what are the business drivers for Cloud Computing?

There are three primary driving forces for adoption of the Cloud Computing model:

1. Cost – ultimately it will be cheaper to provide centralized services from large computing centers than for companies to reproduce the services and personnel themselves. This will threaten a part of the IT department. It will produce reduction in costs that will be too great to ignore. IT is currently a major portion of the cost of corporations. If this could be cut in half, or, get this, by 90%, the cost savings will be too great to ignore.
   The challenge here is existing investments and infrastructure (More on this in a future blog)
   
2. Power – the ability to link, hundreds, thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of computers together to perform tasks is computing power that even the largest supercomputers can not rival. In one example, the New York Times recently used Amazons Cloud Computing service to create PDF versions of hundreds of thousands of documents in only a few days. This would not have been possible internally. As we reach out and embrace information on the internet, we are not longer talking about Megabytes or even Gigabytes. Our clients are demanding Terabytes and to do so, we have to provide multiple Petrabytes of storage (yes, 1000 terabytes). Try to order that from Dell next time you order!
   The challenge here is trust. Businesses have to have standards that they trust for their information. (More on this in a future blog)
   
3. Intelligence – Can you say Skynet? Arnold would be proud. I could have called this one Automation or even Ease of Use. They amount to the same goal of having system in the Cloud Computing environment that makes things easy and powerful for the user. It will begin to resemble intelligence as decisions are made that we begin to trust and rely on. Most Cloud Computing systems are new and rudimentary in their approach. Using Amazons system is for programmers only. Not much Cloud Software exists to open it beyond its current ability. This will change. Certain systems like Google docs and, if I may be so bold, my own companies Marketing Operating System, are a little more mature in their user interfaces and begin to embrace the intelligence promised by the cloud.

Each one of these will be too much for businesses to ignore. Together, they are the next wave in technology and will transform the business landscape for many years to come.