Making the Cloud people ready

Cloud Computing’s latest proposition is attracting a great deal of technology press focus. James Gfiffin, Head of Hosting Strategy at Star considers this both appropriate and fair, due to its fantastic offering. Cloud provides users the ability to access and consume applications, services and resource when needed regardless of device or location. Can your mobile phone do that?

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The focus right now is squarely on the types of technology that will enable Cloud computing to reach its full potential; indeed, there is much debate about all of the elements from storage technologies to server devices and applications and how they will evolve as part of a flexible and elastic computing environment.

Not as many column inches and industry forums are devoted to perhaps the most critical element of the Cloud computing vision: the users. What I mean by this is: Clearly, the technology has been evolving for many years and is reaching a peak of maturity, to enable many diverse and complex services to be delivered; however, are our business models, processes, standards, programming and even our thinking ready to match the technology capability and truly deliver the free-flowing access to resource that the user perceives as Cloud computing?

Understanding the user’s perspective of the cloud can be driven by some simple demographic modelling; after all we are talking about the future, therefore, we should be considering the users of the future. What we are talking about here are end users – they will be the consumers of the cloud, both at home and at work. If you think about how new entrants to the work force and those beginning to take up decision making roles – Generation Y-, consume technology and services, it is completely different to how must of us in the industry do today. We think in terms of Desktop, Server and Web applications, Websites, Intranets, Extranets and portals. We develop or host code and resources for each function and implement protocols for how they communicate with each other.

Generation Y view the world differently. They communicate and interact in applications driven by the device most appropriate for that particular time and situation, expecting a seamless, rich, consistent and instantaneous experience connecting them with data and services as part of a wider social or professional network. Generation Y in the workforce expect to choose when, where and how to work and interact with colleagues.

As the cloud model begins to realise itself, the influence of Generation Y decision makers will bear more and more influence on how we deliver our services. Take the design, build and hosting of an application. Generation Y buyers will have a much greater expectation of the user experience and its translation to mobile devices than today. The ability for their customers, staff and partners to interact in a seamless manner with applications such as Office Communicator, Outlook, document management systems etc will no longer be items that are specified by the more visionary customers – it will become the minimum standard.

On top of this, the expectation will be that the application can utilise next generation hosting services by instantly accessing additional compute power from server farms in order to cope with demand spikes, before scaling back down to a maintenance mode; this brings the revenue streams and infrastructure expenditure into alignment, whilst providing consistent user experience – the utopia of elastic computing.

We are at the beginning of a journey that will change our industry immeasurably – I believe it will also hugely change our businesses and that only those who choose to evolve will flourish. If you take the web hosting industry for an example – will hosters that simply churn out servers or web space have a compelling proposition in 3 years time? Or will it be the providers that offer instantly scaleable pools of compute power, integrated test and development environments in secure and highly available environments?

The businesses that will be successful in the cloud model will be the ones that go beyond innovating with technology. They will evolve their thinking inline with the next generation of buyers and consumers; they will offer more choice and will truly understand that this journey into the cloud will only be successful if we make our products and services people ready.