Does anyone besides me remember the great Furby craze that swept the US in the early 90’s? People went crazy for these little stuffed animals and started collecting them in the hope that one day they would be valuable. Well, that never happened and a lot of people got stuck with expensive toys that they couldn’t get rid of. Is it possible that the current cloud computing craze in IT is another Furby fading that will fade?

What kind of services come in a cloud?
If a CIO can get beyond the hype, they need to spend some time doing their homework to figure out what kinds of services a cloud might offer that their business could use. Neal Leavitt has spent some time studying cloud computing and has summarized cloud services into four types of services:

• Basic Services – This isn’t glamorous, but it may be the most popular type of service a cloud environment can offer your business. Basically, simple Internet-based services such as database functionality and capacity, middleware, and additional storage are used to supplement what your business already has.
• IaaS: Buzzword alert: “Infrastructure as a Service”. This is when you are renting an entire computer (CPU, storage, bandwidth, etc.) that you access over the Internet. You would use this infrastructure to run your company’s applications on lock-stock-and-barrel.
• PaaS – Platform as a Service – Provides your business with a development environment that your IT staff can use to create new applications for the rest of the business (and your customers) to use. This is a computer plus development tools.
• SaaS – Software as a Service – This is where you don’t care what the software runs on, you just want to buy access to the application. The most famous example of this is the Salesforce.com CRM application.

Why bother with a cloud?

The research company Forrester has done some digging and now claims that most of the company’s data centers use less than 50% of their total capacity. Despite the hype surrounding cloud computing today, Leavitt has discovered three very good reasons to consider having his company go cloud computing:

1. Availability – Interestingly, despite many companies’ misgivings about losing control over their IT team, there’s a lot to be said for having a professional company that has the deep pockets required for redundant systems and proven disaster recovery plans to execute. your IT infrastructure. If you work in a small or even medium-sized business, this can be especially valuable to you.
2. App integration: Sorry, we can’t do anything with those old apps you’re running. However, the new ones that are developed to run in the cloud will be easy to integrate almost automatically because they will use the set of web interface languages/tools (SOAP, XML, etc.) that facilitate this task.
3. Flexibility: Unlike most cell phone providers in the US, most cloud computing service providers today do not require users to sign long-term contracts that insure them. This makes it easy to quickly get more cloud resources when your business needs them.

final thoughts

It’s all too easy for CIOs who are opposed to change to see the current enthusiasm for cloud computing and decide that it’s just another fad that will fade with time. The reality is that cloud computing provides several different types of services that are useful to any IT department. This cannot be ignored.

Furthermore, successfully adding cloud computing resources to the company’s existing IT infrastructure will mean that CIOs will have found a way to apply IT to enable the rest of the company to grow faster, move faster and do more. .