The Unanswered Questions Of Cloud Technology
October 25, 2012
Grazed from TechWeek Europe. Author: Peter Judge.
Everyone is out there selling the cloud like there’s no tomorrow, so it’s tempting to think the technology is all done. But there are people out there who say that is not the case. The cloud is still scaling up, and it’s not always a hundred percent clear how services will be operated, as more and more users turn to public shared resources for more of their IT.
The dream of cloud activists seems to be a shift away from in-house IT , and long term outsourcing deals, running on stable hardware in known locations. Instead, resource locations will be flexible, and customer processes will be running in an increasingly ad hoc, transitory way, on different providers’ services…
The new cloud deal
That will make new demands on service providers. The fresh requirements will be both technological and contractual – and where possible cloud providers will use technological means, to automate and re-automate the services they offer to meet customer needs. “Service level management will be crucial,” says John Manley, director of cloud services at HP Labs in Bristol, UK, who spoke to TechWeekEurope after a keynote at last week’s IP Expo in London.
For him, a full implementation of the vision of the cloud would involve allowing your service provider to subcontract parts of the offering to other providers if they can do it cheaper. That may seem more radical than some cloud visions, but it’s emerged from the heritage of HP Labs, which has been experimenting with cloud services since before the name was coined – back in the 1990s, these were known as ASPs (application service providers)…
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