Saturday, August 2, 2008

IT Enterprise 2.0

I mentioned the following in my previous post :

"In its ultimate and extreme form which may take many years to materialize hardware will finally be bought and managed by large service providers. Most enterprises will then have a link to the cloud. Think of it like the electricity supply to consumers and businesses. Now we don't need to have generators to produce our electricity but rather depend on a central agency which generates electricity. Replace electricity with computing and storage and you see how these service providers will build and sell computing services. Thus the complexity is pushed to the periphery or the user is distanced from the core."

Data Centers will move to the periphery or away from the enterprises to service providers. As that happens all that goes into the data centers (computing infra, storage infra, systems administration, system management et al). So what will IT Managers do? What would be in the realm of the CIO and the IT Managers once the cloud becomes staple (and stable)?

The focus will then shift on those that are relevant to the enterprise users and not handled by the cloud. All that relates to cloud's performance will be factored in the QoS SLA of the cloud. Here are things that IT departments will then be working on:
  • Focus on applications, their relevance, efficiency and architecture
  • Performance of infrastructure that links to the cloud. The network elements linking to the cloud will ultimately decide the quality of service that would be realized
  • Focus on end user experience of applications. This is something which seems to be long missing out its rightful share.
  • Enterprise management will be reduced to managing performance of network elements which in all likelyhood will be outsourced to the network provider. Centerstage will be Business Service Management where the ultimate impact and performance at the business performance level will manage. The market for bulky enterprise management tools will suddenly shrink to the cloud providers who will be servicing hundreds and thousands of customers

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