As we move more and more toward storing virtually all of our personal information in the cloud, we may see a faster acceptance of businesses using the cloud to cut costs and rely solely on subscription based infrastructure.
Marc Andreessen showed up on the Charlie Rose show evangelizing the future of cloud computing.
“So you’ve got a whole generation of start-ups that are basically just a couple of programmers with a couple of laptops, and they upload everything into the Amazon cloud. It’s pay-by-the-drink like utility. So all of a sudden, you have this whole new wave of Internet start-ups getting started for practically no money, right? So there is a level of innovation. Every kid coming out of Harvard, every kid coming out of school now thinks he can be the next Mark Zuckerberg, and with these new technologies like cloud computing, he actually has a shot.”
Think about it, that’s a pretty fantastic ideal. We’ve literally entered a time when virtually anyone with a vision and executable plan can see it to fruition without requiring large amounts of capital to create a sustainable infrastructure. You’re infrastructure is already built, ready and waiting for you to lease on an as needed basis.
But how long will it be before large, well established behemoths of the industry spread their wings and trust their data to the cloud?
While many executives responsible for their companies’ IT operations grok the vision, they still refuse to make the switch. More than 60 percent of the companies surveyed recently by Kelton Research reported they did not use cloud-computing technologies, and most of them have no plans to use them anytime soon.
Chalk up their lingering resistance to a couple of old bugaboos which have been around since the days when “MIS directors,” pressed to decentralize their computer operations, ruled the tech roost: security and fear of loss of control. If past is prologue, those issues will get sorted out over time–the same way that the sundry issues surrounding client-server and Internet-based computing models ultimately got resolved.
Within the next 10 years I predict that not only will cloud computing be commonplace but companies will wonder why they have lived without it in the first place.
