The evolution of cloud
Experts agree that cloud computing is pretty amazing, but it’s not a new concept.
“Looking at best practices, this stuff isn’t new anymore,” Caplan says. “We’re in year eight now. Salesforce has been around since 1999. Amazon Web Services, Google — whether you’re using their technology, none of them are brand new, so there are a lot of best practices to learn from.”
So if this isn’t new, it’s interesting to look at how cloud has developed and how it’s changing business. Dillon is amazed by cloud computing, and it’s hard to disagree with him.
“This cloud thing is the biggest thing that’s happened in technology since the IBM computer, and that’s pretty big, and at least as big as the Internet in terms of economic disruption, because it changes how and where we do our computing,” Dillon says.
He says to go back a few years and remember how every small and midsized business had a room with computers in it and maybe a server or two.
“As businesspeople, you probably didn’t understand what they were for, but you knew they were important and you wrote checks,” he says. “It was hard to be good at that, because you had a business to run, and presumably you were an expert at that business, and you used technology to be good at that business or best at that business, so it was a necessary evil.”
Over the last 10 to 15 years, a variety of things happened that became game changers. First, we got the Internet.
“Everybody is connected — not just a few people are connected — and we’re connected not just inside our companies but outside our companies,” Dillon says.
Second, access became ubiquitous with the advent of cell phones, BlackBerrys, iPhones and laptops.
Then access got cheap — almost free. It doesn’t cost you anything to go to Google and look up any information that you want.
“You think about that perfect storm that happened — we’re having an explosion,” Dillon says.
McNaught would add another element to that perfect storm — the PC itself. He asks how many people really love their PC with its bulk, weight and the fact that if you drop it, it’s useless. He says the data indicates that PC market share, which is about 94 percent now, will drop over the next decade to about 10 percent.
“It’s not because less PCs will be sold — maybe a few less, but it will lose its role as the core device we use to access our stuff,” he says “You’ll see this huge proliferation has already started with tablets and mobile devices and mobile phones and the mobile Internet exploding now. The question becomes, how do I access my stuff? How do I access it securely? And how do I access it at the lowest cost?”
These are questions that most people would agree are incredibly important. In fact, these questions are reasons why cloud hasn’t been successful in the past.
“This had been tried before and it’s failed, because there were two things we couldn’t get right as an industry,” McNaught says. “Early on, we couldn’t make all the software that was important to your business work reliably. We walked into the hospital and the hospital says, ‘We have 400 applications, we can only make 350 work on the cloud. Where are the other 50 we need to execute?’”
The other factor was user experience.
“If you get, from the cloud, an experience that is the slightest bit less robust than the experience you get at home or the office today, what are you going to do?” McNaught says. “You’re going to go beat the living daylights out of the IT guy who suggested the cloud.”
But now, the technologies have changed, and these two pieces have largely been addressed. On top of that, security is stronger than with a PC, and that’s why companies large and small are now using the cloud.
“There’s an adage in the IT industry that when you introduce a technology that reduces costs, you’re giving up benefits, and if you introduce a technology that gives you big benefits, it costs you a fortune,” McNaught says. “The thing about cloud computing is that it fires on both cylinders — it reduces costs dramatically and delivers incremental benefits that you don’t get with the current model.”
