Page 162 - How Cloud Computing Is Transforming Business and Why You Cant Afford to Be Left Behind

MANA GEMENT STRATEGIES F O R THE CL OUD R EV OL UTION

servers in the data center, IT can now develop applications in
the cloud that are destined to run in the same place where they
were developed—the public cloud. The development team can
be dispersed and still combine its efforts on a teamwork-
produced product. The conflicts with its target environment
that are so often resident in new software are resolved when

the development takes place in the cloud.
In the long run, many new software capabilities will ap-
pear or, rather, reside beneath ease-of-use interfaces in the
cloud. The internal IT organization will be able to develop a
new application rapidly by turning to Microsoft’s Azure cloud
or some other cloud destination to make use of the tools there
to assemble an application that is destined to run in the same

cloud. Providing good software tools and making it easy to
extend an existing application or pull in services from other
sites and other applications will make the cloud a prime de-
velopment platform, one where the business analyst or other
computer-literate business user will be a coequal player with
the C# or Java programmer. Business analysts can build the ap-
plication they need at a given time by choosing options from a
menu of application functions geared to the business analyst’s
domain.

In all likelihood, end users with many skill levels are going
to find ways to use the resources they find in the cloud to
assemble new applications and accomplish the business task
in front of them. They will act on their own instead of waiting
for skilled IT staffers to methodically produce new software.
In the cloud, the end users will be given powerful specialized

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