There’s been a lot of discussion lately about clouds and the future of IT across the blogosphere: Chuck is always good for a post or two; IBM spoke up the other day; and there are even reports that “Hey, this is real!”.¬† I can’t help but wonder if Cloud Computing is really just the marriage of flexible architecture, ubiquitous networks and IT Service Management?¬† As has been noted on this blog I am highly infrastructure biased, but I think it is apparent that fast, readily available networks are changing IT, your phone, laptop, Kindle, &c. are now viable end devices for application and content delivery almost anywhere on the planet.¬† Exciting times indeed!
If you scratch beneath the surface a bit the magic and mystery of the Cloud becomes a little more apparent: you have a high-performance, omnipresent network; a flexible delivery engine that is highly scalable and efficient; and a management framework that provides the appropriate Service Levels, security, compliance and communications the customer is seeking.  To truly deliver a cloud service you first have to identify and define a service that can be readily doled out to customers clamoring for it.  I can think of tons of services internal to an enterprise that would qualify for this designation, so I think the concept of a private cloud is a cogent one.  Take for example File Sharing, or Email, or Market Data, or Order Processing.
So why now?  The emergence of good allocation and resource management tools certainly makes the management of the service a lot easier, add adaptive authentication, identity management and role based access, couple that with the virtualization capabilities and infrastructure components geared to hypervirtualization and you have the recipe for easy to deploy private and public crowds.  The market adoption of frameworks like ITIL and ISO 20000 and their focus on Service Level Management provides the appropriate mindset for the IT organization looking to become service oriented.  Now ride all of that on a ubiquitous, converged, highly available fabric and you can provide these services to pretty much any client, via any platform, any where.
Suddenly Clouds aren’t so amorphous but really the next logical progression of virtualized infrastructure, Service-Oriented Architecture, and IT Service Management.
21st Century bureau computing…..