Cloud computing moving from theory to practice

As the global economy meanders through continued malaise, IT organisations will be faced with the pressure of doing more with less. This is hardly a new theme and has been a driving force in organisations for the past decade. Economic challenges mean that IT budgets will likely remain flat or grow only modestly, creating situations where new initiatives can only begin if costs are removed or reduced from other business areas. However, the good news is that there are several ways to help organisations become more efficient to free up budget and resources for higher-value, critical IT projects. These include:

Resource utilisation improvements through continued consolidation and virtualisation

Automation and self-service in areas such as provisioning and identity management

Initiatives that reduce the costs for power, cooling, and physical facilities.

There are three irrefutable requirements that will continue to drive the IT organisations—the ever-growing demand for increased compute capacity, application performance, and data volumes. Moore’s, Kryder’s, and Butter’s laws that predict compute, storage, and network capacity growth over time have proven true. Scale-out architectures have recently become a popular approach to keep up with these exploding demands. In 2012, we believe the predominant driver of scale-out architectures will be big data resulting from the explosion of mobile, commerce, and indexed unstructured data. A

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