Page 185 - How Cloud Computing Is Transforming Business and Why You Cant Afford to Be Left Behind

Y O UR CL OUD STRATEG Y: WHAT KIND O F COMPANY DO Y O U W ANT?

can afford. This is an unheralded, revolutionary change in the
business landscape, one that applies to global competition,
and its ramifications have yet to be fully understood.
If you don’t get into the habit of making use of large
amounts of resources, if you stick to the attitude that comput-
ing power is a scarce and precious resource, your company will

be outflanked by those that figure out how to tap into the cloud.
Some companies will encourage their employees to use lots of
computer power on promising ideas. Others will hold back,
pointing to the critics who say that the cloud may not be a para-
digm shift, or that it may turn out to be more expensive than the
“enthusiasts” think. For that matter, I know of no academic study
that establishes the cloud’s economies of scale beyond a shadow

of a doubt. So let’s keep an open mind on the evidence. The
people who bet that cloud computing will be as expensive as or
more expensive than corporate data centers have missed out
on the way cloud data centers leave their predecessors’ expen-
sive complexities behind. Critics fail to understand the rapid
productivity gains that flow from virtualizing a cluster of servers
and managing them as one large computer—remember the
Google engineer’s concept, “The Data Center as a Computer.”

Users May Seek Generous Cloud Use;
What’s Wrong with That?

It is intuitive to many, although not yet proven, that the cloud
has the potential to do for business computing what the In-
ternet did for private corporate networks—provide a publicly

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