Big Data is Cloud’s Killer App

March 12, 2014 Off By David

Grazed from SysCon Media. Author: Brad Vaughan.

It is still very difficult for a traditional enterprise to find a path from current infrastructure deployment models to a pure cloud architecture. I have discussed many times before that a very tangible "Trigger Event" needs to be identified that will get the gears in motion. The recipe for this change, often needs a second ingredient which is readily accessible technology that allows IT to create solutions with minimal upfront investment (i.e ShadowIT).

This "Trigger Event" cannot be described in abstract terms like "ROI" or "TCO" and definiely not business strategy terms like "agility" or "time-2-market". These are all good labels to frame the beginning of the discussion at executive levels, but where the rubber meets the road is real applications providing real intelligence or new services. The problem is most enterprises have a large legacy environment of applications…

They are struggling under the burden of maintenance and operations. Each of these applications has a significant amount of "lock-in", preventing them from making any significant change. To adopt a completely new architecture, like a horizontally scalable web architecture would require a complete collapse of the existing application. The guardians vendors of enterprise applications rarely let that occur…