Finding the true value of cloud means not focusing on infrastructure

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Mark Eisenberg.

Cloud computing is first and foremost an economic model. Many IT innovations, such as virtualization, have originated from the need to improve the economics of IT; cost increases of more hardware, complexity and administrative requirements eclipsed cost improvements gained from server hardware commoditization. Virtualization had the promise to bring this under control, but the improvements have been modest. The reduced friction to deploy has resulted in an explosion of server instances along with the costs that accompany them.

And while virtualization offered to solve the economic challenges of enterprise IT, cloud computing affects the economies of building Web-scale applications. There is little doubt that companies like Google and Amazon wouldn’t have been able to achieve their current reach and margin models if they had continued to leverage traditional large-scale compute techniques. Infrastructure costs alone would have ruined their prospects…

Even though cloud finds its technological roots in virtualization, its economic model more closely resembles the PC market, in which individuals adopted and then took to the enterprise. This was a new way for technology to enter IT’s realm — resistance was high but relatively futile…

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