The value of the cloud: It never was about the technology!

Grazed from FederalTimes. Author: Doug Bourgeois.

Cloud computing has been over-hyped. Everybody knows it. Most people now cringe at the sound of the word “cloud” and for good reason. A quick Internet search of the term “cloud computing” returns 392 million hits! That’s a lot of cloud. There is good reason for all this hype. Cloud computing has significantly transformed the information technology (IT) industry.

Much like the transformation from mainframe to client-server computing did a few decades ago, and the Internet after that, cloud computing is changing the fundamentals of IT once again. Unfortunately, the dramatic results in cost efficiency and agility that cloud promises have drawn attention away from the real goal: transforming to IT-as-a-Service (ITaaS)…

While technology is an absolute necessity, ITaaS is about so much more than that. But the technology is an absolute necessity. So, let’s address that first. Recall that cloud computing has five core attributes: services-based, multi-tenant, consumption-based, elastic, and anytime/anywhere access. The path to providing these core capabilities involves a lot of technology. The architectural side of this journey is embodied in the software-defined data center (SDDC). The core technologies of SDDC include: compute virtualization, storage virtualization, and network virtualization…

Read more from the source @ http://www.federaltimes.com/article/20131216/BLGR03/312160016/The-value-cloud-never-about-technology-?odyssey=nav%7Chead