Page 82 - 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

This discussion might sound academic, but this change is
what provides flexibility and power to the users of cloud com-
puting. Applications are computing’s workhorses; they power
the processes that keep businesses running. They contain the
business logic that gets work done for the end user, whether
it’s the chief financial officer, the factory floor manager, or the

youngest rep on the sales force.
Applications and hardware used to be so tightly welded
together that corporate data center managers hated to have to
migrate an application off its existing hardware. Often it had
been running on the same machine for eight or ten years. But
gains in hardware performance are so swift that such migra-
tions become necessary after an extended period. That meant

that the application needed to be tested with a new version of
the operating system geared to new hardware. It often meant
many finite adjustments to the application itself and uncer-
tainty over whether it would continue to run flawlessly. Every-
thing might still have the same name, such as Xeon hardware,
the Windows operating system, and the General Accounting
application, but in fact thousands of little changes had gone
on underneath the covers during those eight to ten years. At
the end of a long and painful migration path, with the new sys-

tem configured and the application adjustments made, the
application could still fail. The result inevitably was upset users
calling the data center, if not calling for IT managers’ heads.
And CEOs, COOs, and CFOs sometimes joined in.
With the tie between the application and a particular
piece of hardware broken, the traditional data center benefits
by being able to upgrade its hardware but continue using the

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