I’ve written before that I don’t think Cloud Computing is anything new: I still fail to see how it differs from Software as a Service (SaaS) with a bit of On-Demand computing thrown in where it makes sense.
I’m not saying the model mightn’t be more appealing in this day and age — think spiralling power costs, limited data centre real estate, exploding storage and processing requirements — I’m just saying that it’s not a new concept at all… [click continue reading for more]…
A former colleague of mine, research director Tim Jennings at Butler Group, tends to agree. In a recent opinion piece he wrote: “I believe that the leap forward to cloud computing is not as large as it may seem at first sight. For large organisations today the data centre is often located at a remote site, accessed over network connections; it is also becoming highly virtualised, breaking down the direct relationship between particular applications, servers, and storage.”
“There is relatively little difference between this and the cloud computing model, and I believe we will see a blending of the two models, as organisations both develop their own internal cloud infrastructures, and supplement existing capacity with external cloud services,” said Jennings.
I don’t blame the IT industry for constantly reinventing itself, it’s just that Cloud has come so soon after SaaS and Web 2.0 that I think it does little just yet to clarify the key challenges in the infrastructure space for users – nor how they should overcome them. What do you think?
