Page 15 - How Cloud Computing Is Transforming Business and Why You Cant Afford to Be Left Behind

INTRODUC TION

makes up a quarter of the expense of running a data center;
cloud data centers take advantage of low-cost energy sites. The
enterprise data center, with its need to be close to headquar-
ters or manufacturing, can’t do that.
Granted, some claim that “the cloud” is just another cycle
in our seemingly endless series of technology enthusiasms,

only to be followed by disappointment. Gartner says that “the
cloud” is at the peak of its “hype” cycle, where the highest
hopes are invested in it, and at the same time, it’s at the top of
the list of innovations likely to be adopted in the coming year.
That in itself is a rare convergence.
The last hype cycle brought us the dot-com boom, followed
by an even more dramatic bust. That boom reflected a fever

for Web traffic and led to investment in sites meant to attract a
million visitors a week, with imaginary profits to follow. The
cloud is more real than the dot-com boom.
The cloud is a set of major productivity gains in comput-
ing, each of which is a multiplier of standard computer power
in its own right. These multipliers are converging in this new
style of data center, combined with a new empowerment of the
end user. We are close to moving beyond the world of known
computing patterns into a field of dreams, where such data

centers are built partly in the belief that end users will not be
able to resist their raw compute power or the powerful serv-
ices that will be created there. I believe that at some point,
these data centers will be linked together, backing each other
up over the Internet until the old Sun Microsystems dictum,
“the network is the computer,” finally comes true. This self-
reinforcing grid of computer power will reach out to end

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