Blogger: Lyn Robison
The graphic below is from my esteemed Burton Group colleague Dan Blum’s upcoming Catalyst presentation on Cloud computing.
As he explains in a recent blog post,: “As we move from left to right in the diagram and put more and more control in the hands of the service providers, the outlook shifts from fair weather green to ominous red.”
The far-left column shows in green that a traditional enterprise IT department controls the entire technology stack with only the network shared with a service provider (because of the Internet). The next column shows that with server hosting providers, the organization shares control of the server, storage, and network functions.
Dan explains in his blog, “As we move from Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) with its line of demarcation in the server where the silicon stops, to Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) where you cross the line after your code and applications are integrated with outside components, to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) where you abandon all control when you hand over your data I paint the functions these services control an alarming red.”
This graphic illustrates that as cloud computing alters the IT landscape, data is the only thing that organizations maintain any control over. Ironically, most enterprises lack any formal data management function. IT people tend to think that their job is to manage technology and systems, yet data (not technology) is something that enterprises must manage as cloud computing becomes prevelant.
As cloud computing gets adopted, those enterprise IT people who think that their job is merely to manage technology and systems will find themselves no longer working in enterprise IT –- they will be forced to go to work for or to compete against cloud providers.
The Information Management track in the upcoming Catalyst conference will provide guidance for managing enterprise data, which is important because, as this graphic illustrates, data management might become the primary task of enterprise IT in the future.
It’s good to see Dan and yourself expanding the debate around the usage of cloud computing to include what data should be moved into the cloud, not just what infrastructure. Assuming adequate data security measures have been implemented, organizations should be considering what class of data is best suited to the cloud i.e. how can I leverage cloud computing to lower the cost of information management while still satisfying business requirements and SLA’s. For example, at RainStor we realized that while our technology was capable of supporting a broad range of cloud-based data management services, historical data in legacy applications that is accessed infrequently but needs to be retained for legal, regulatory or business purposes was the most appropriate data to manage in the cloud. As such we’ve decided to initially focus on delivering a cloud archive service for retiring legacy applications http://tinyurl.com/pp42jd.
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