FOCUS CLOUD SPECIAL
Issue 19, January 2012
THE CLOUD REVOLUTION
Some say the next industrial revolution will be the Cloud. But instead of making people work around the clock, this revolution is meant to be about reducing the sweat and toil. But not everyone is happy, or prepared, for the new cloud paradigm, and Penny Jones discovers why
difficulty for people in an infrastructure job today because voting for the Cloud means voting for redundancy.”
T
Simon Walsh, the executive VP at data center services provider Colt, was speaking alongside other vendors at VMworld Europe, just weeks after HP Cloud advisor Lee Kendrie also confi rmed the Cloud is likely to cost a lot of people their jobs if they don’t change the way they work.
“Defi nitely, people are scared of losing their role. As we automate there are costs that are reduced and sometimes those do result in headcount changes. It is a real-world fact, and businesses can’t ignore that and still be relevant,” Kendrie says.
The fact that once cloud deployments take off they can multiply with ferocious speed probably makes this issue even more pertinent. We covered the need for a change in roles in FOCUS 17, in ‘Don’t get Fired Over the Cloud’, which looked at the responsibilities placed on key decision makers, especially the CIO, that differ due to the Cloud. One wrong turn can easily lead to the chopping block.
“You will be fi red as a CIO if you don’t know where things are running. You will be fi red if something goes down and you don’t know about it,” HP Enterprise Services SVP and general manager of Infrastructure Technology Outsourcing Pete Karolczak says in the piece (you can view this online at under our Digital Editions, Issue17).
DON’T BLAME THE CLOUD
The Cloud should not take all the blame for these shifts in IT culture. Demand for cloud is coming from new end-user requirements and expectations on IT for those who deliver it.
IBM’s Smarter Planet program is a perfect example of how requirements in business are
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changing. IBM manager for Power Systems Software Ian Jarman says Smarter Planet is really about the way technology integrates with the business to provide what the end user requires, not the technology itself. It promotes the key concepts of cloud computing, big data analytics and optimized systems – all elements that
require change in the data
center, that also move businesses into a more advanced and smart way of using the IT that is available to them.
“People want to deploy applications in the private cloud or access new services through the public cloud, which means data center operators are being asked to implement the new virtualization and new dynamic resource management tools that are behind cloud computing,” Jarman says.
“We are also seeing new applications driving much larger volumes of data than ever before. Increasing data is not only a challenge for infrastructure
management but also for storage management and business analytics.”
HP’s Kendrie spends most of his working hours dealing with HP clients, constructing roadmaps for a move to the Cloud. He says the biggest shift for those working with the Cloud will be taking on a service-centric model. “If you look at how cloud is being delivered today, as a particular service, that is what it is all about,” Kendrie says. “This is
At the recent Fujitsu Technology
Fujitsu Forum in Munich, Services CEO Rolf
Schwirz painted an even more precise picture of the future for those working in the data center. “Cloud computing is not a new technology, it is a new delivery model… It is a services business. It will not be about hardware
and software and other stuff.
Instead, it will actually be about the service- level agreement.” (See more about Schwirz’ vision for Fujitsu’s cloud on page 38).
“The questions about the stack will disappear, because customers will buy a service. This means the famous technology brands we see today will become reduced weight in the whole discussion.” It’s a massive shift, especially for those in the technology space that are passionate about technology.
RESISTING THE CLOUD
Oxford University operates its IT through a central computing service, internal to the university but run by separate departments. On a daily basis the university deals with sensitive information – from research fi ndings and
a market that the user is driving – there is a much higher level of user expectation today. This market says: “Don’t tell me I can’t have something, because I will go out and get it anyway. So the IT organization is going to have to facilitate connectivity and fl exibility for the end user.”
here it was on a platter – the words few were willing to admit offered up quite spontaneously to the press. “This (the Cloud) presents a lot of
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