Page 109 - How Cloud Computing Is Transforming Business and Why You Cant Afford to Be Left Behind

THE HYBRID CL OUD

software that was already in use. Just keeping the place run-
ning, sometimes referred to as “maintenance,” sapped every-
body’s time and consumed the lion’s share of the company’s
computing budget.
We may be on the eve of a brave new world of cloud com-
puting, but in some respects, not all that much has changed.

Gartner Inc. says that 75 percent of the information technol-
ogy budget still goes to maintenance and only 25 percent to
new projects and initiatives. For years, everyone has wanted
to reverse those numbers. But two severe recessions in this first
decade of the twenty-first century have made companies leery
of overstaffing and overspending on IT development. Every-
body is trying to do more with less. The application backlog,

which today looks more like a service backlog or a business
process backlog, continues undiminished. Frustration mounts.
Soon after I went to work for InformationWeek, the question
arose, why was the maintenance burden so heavy? Why did the
needle never move off the 75 percent mark on the gauge (an
average across many businesses) year after year? The answer
in part was the ongoing complexity of corporate data centers.
In many cases, the venerable IBM mainframe sits at the core,
with powerful Unix boxes running database systems and im-

portant legacy applications. The corporate Web site is being
run on a set of Linux boxes, and many employees are tied into
Windows servers for Office and other desktop applications.
In fact, most corporate data centers have one of just about
everything. In one corner, a legacy HP server is running its
old proprietary operating system; in another, an ancient Dig-
ital Equipment Corp. server is running a different operating

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