Trending Technology - Cloud Is Here To Stay
The past two decades have seen a significant disruption in the way we do business. If we look at the IT Industry itself it has transformed itself from companies that were doing hardware or software alone to companies that have understood that convergence of hardware and software is the key to success. On one hand the internet from being just a medium data connectivity which people used to use either for web mail or browsing has not metamorphosed into a massive unified converged communication channel whether it is voice data or even video. Companies that pioneered this were valued at billions of dollars whether it is a Skype or whether it is a WhatsApp ultimately got bought over at several times their initial valuation and have today become a way of life or a part of any users’ day to day interaction with the world at large. Even a day to day consumer of internet services has seen the power of the internet grow and percolate into our daily lives through the advent cloud based computing and social media popularity rise through Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter, LinkedIn and most recently the several hundred apps that have emerged on hand held devices that enable everything from on line shopping to gaming, maps to mobile wallets. So cloud has enabled even the common man to connect with friends, make online payments, chat, video chat and also make voice calls and also find directions without the need to ask a passerby. All this is possible with ubiquity of data connectivity and convergence of voice, data and video as long as he has a hand held mobility device that is connected to the cloud.
While this has been happening on one hand, in the B2C space, if we look at the B2B space also, corporates have moved from the conventional data centre based model to cloud based computing. If we go back, before the advent of large MPLS networks and redundant data centers there was the advent of UNIX based systems that had dumb terminals with all the computing power concentrated on a server that had the OS, Database as well as application and we had dumb terminals called as RS 232 terminals that slowly died down because of the advent of more powerful LAN-Ethernet, thick Ethernet etc. That concept slowly moved to Data centre’s when reliability, availability, redundancy and Continuity of business became important considerations to run enterprise applications. Not only have the servers moved in a virtual environment to an AWS or an Azure platform but so have the enterprise applications, their ERPs and organizational tools to manage right from their sales reporting to production and finally functions like HR logistics have moved to a SAAS based model completely on the cloud.
John Gage, a research scientist at Sun Microsystems once said these words that continue to remain true for generations to come- "The network is the computer." These words also became the company’s tag line for many years and continue even after Sun became Oracle. And in today’s world continue to stand tall with the advent of cloud computing.
With LAN becoming stronger and stronger over time, with each passing day there was a time when we moved from low speed LANS to high speed LANS and from Kbps speeds to Mbps speeds and finally GBPS speeds. The very same evolution has occurred with wireless networks while wireless networks become stronger, there will be immense convergence of wired and wireless technologies through extended wireless networks which started initially with offering connectivity in Kbps, moving on to Mbps and very soon the day is not very far away when connectivity of every possible wireless network will show speed tests crossing Gbps speeds coupled with the ability to reach the remotest of locations all over the globe seamlessly and without data loss rather with robust Gbps connectivity. If we circle back to the words of John Gage they are with each passing day more and more relevant and pronounced.
With the advent of cloud however the skills required to manage speed, performance security redundancy, availability and continuity of business, applications will also be of a very specialized nature The world will require Data centre and networking experts of a different nature, the skill set will move from being a pure applications guy or a pure networking guy to someone with a core skill set and also who can converge business and Technology together through newer ideas and ways of implementing solutions over the cloud.
The skill required to make a cloud security specialists will vary and acquiring those skills is going to be increasingly important with each passing day.
Conclusion
The dynamics are changing from a technology as well as business stand point, tomorrows networks and cloud computing will be able to do much more than todays’ and cloud is here to stay. All businesses and technology enabled organizations will need to adapt to cloud computing thereby early adapters will have a business and technology edge over the slow movers.