We are in a big transition from a device-centric world to an information-centric world. It’s going to be about how do you make the information useful and available and make that the centre of people’s lives instead of specific devices. Devices will have to cleave to the information rather than the other way around. IT infrastructure, the plumbing, will fade away for most users and businesses, and will increasingly be left to
professional providers.Paul Maritz, VMware CEO, November 2008
This Quick Start Guide has discussed the meanings, the technologies, the benefits and the risks of cloud computing, and presented a number of common adoption scenarios. The case studies recounted success stories from a wide range of industry sectors and from companies of all sizes, while tips, tools and checklists were included to help you choose a provider and move your business into the cloud. But is cloud computing just a ‘storm in a teacup’ and will it soon be replaced by the next ‘next big thing’? I honestly do not think so and I am not alone in my belief.
According to Microsoft research chief Rick Rashid, in 2009 around 20 per cent of all the servers sold around the world were being bought by a small handful of internet companies – namely, Microsoft, Google, Yahoo and Amazon (Waters, 2009). It is clear then that public clouds account for much of the computing that we already do and I expect us to do much more in public clouds – as businesses and as individuals. But private clouds, hybrid clouds and community clouds will also be prevalent. For example, the governments of both the United States of America (http://www.apps.gov/) and the United Kingdom (Arthur, 2010) have launched major government cloud initiatives. All this suggests to me that cloud computing is here to stay.
In this concluding chapter I will address the main obstacles to cloud computing adoption, predict how these and other
problems will be overcome, and wrap up the book with ten top tips.