Our economy is deep into its second year of recession, which is a prelude to a more long term "unwinding" of economic activity. PC and server sales are down. IT salaries are stagnant and budgets are being reduced. Virtually every larger than life IT vendor (AMD, Cisco, Google, HP, IBM and Microsoft) has shed employees and profits as well. Small and medium-sized businesses are locked out of credit markets. And it ain't close to being over. Commercial real estate mortgage defaults are on the rise and consumer credit card defaults are just around the corner. In an economy that has accumulated mind-boggling private debt there is no economic recovery that is ever going to generate enough future wealth to pay it all back.
When the talking heads start bloviating about economic recovery, my response is recover to what? A more of the same economic recovery isn't going to happen because the cheap energy and credit fueled bubble economy is over. The best we can hope for is a gradual economic retreat or unwinding of the economy to a lower energy and material consumptive way of life. The population and resource constraints of living on a finite sphere are going to demand it. But will IT get it? Greening IT is a good starting place, but it is not the end of the journey. IT needs to prepare for a decade of economic decline.
Since the future will not look like the past, what should IT be doing besides getting lean and mean? Basically, IT needs to disappear into the business. The era of putting users on hold and taking months to deploy applications is over. No business can afford to wait for IT to do its job in the manner to which it has been accustomed.
The disappearing IT function has a number of drivers. Vastly reduced credit and borrowing will limit the ability of small and medium-sized businesses to run up-to-date computer rooms stocked with state-of-the-art servers and expensive to license proprietary software. Small businesses will be financing their operations out of their accounts receivable and barter arrangements. Rising energy costs will be back. Yes, the price of energy is going to go up again with all that it entails, including higher energy costs for computer rooms, higher energy costs to light, heat and cool buildings. Increases in state and local taxes are coming. States and towns are not permitted to run budget deficits so taxes will increase in the short term. Eventually government at all levels will unwind due to an inability to raise tax revenues from businesses and citizens who are going to be a lot less wealthy.
The new invisible IT will be born out of business necessity to not only do more with less but to do it faster with reduced capital costs and without creating new IT fiefdoms. Well, if IT disappears into the business just where does it go? The answer is to go outside during day. Look towards the sky and tell me what you are likely to see. Did you see clouds? If you did, then you have the answer.
It may be a coincidence that Amazon, Google, IBM, HP, Sun (Oracle) and a host of newcomers have all launched their cloud computing offerings within the past year just as our economy entered a long term recession because IT will be transformed within the infrastructure, applications and services of cloud computing environments.
The pay for what you use model of cloud computing combined with its rapidly expanding menu of computing services on demand is going to be irresistibly attractive to small and medium-sized businesses. Businesses relocating their IT services to the cloud will need to install adequate Internet bandwidth with provisions for fail-over to another Internet Service Provider, but they can look forward to exchanging their costly computer rooms for cheaper wiring closets in which to locate their firewalls and routers.
Predictably, those with the most to lose when IT makes its move to the cloud will spread the usual fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) that cloud computing is not secure. But if the truth be told, cloud computing is probably more secure than most computer rooms in small and medium-sized businesses. But don't take my word for it. Inquire with your prospective cloud computing providers with regard to their security practices and the audits they have submitted to in order to get their certifications for best practices and security.
The other bug-a-boo of cloud computing is the potential for service outages, which is not a good thing if your IT infrastructure, applications and data are located in the cloud. In the past there have been temporary service outages at Amazon and several Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers. So if the prospect of any service outage is unacceptable then you will need to work a bit smarter and spend more money to make sure your cloud computing environment is less subject to cloud provider glitches or a backhoe operator digging a hole in the wrong place.
OK, if IT disappears into the cloud, what will everyone in IT do? Well, IT staff will still need to manage local routers and firewalls and premises-based end nodes like PCs, laptops, netbooks, thin clients and printers. And they will need to manage the life cycle of their cloud-based servers although a fair portion of this work can and will be automated. Developers may need to tailor existing applications for cloud computing. Managers will need to oversee what is being done in the cloud and determine how well IT operations are meshing with the objectives of the business and the needs of customers who will have more to say about business processes and service than ever before.
The jump to cloud computing may not happen overnight for most small and medium-sized businesses. However, IT staffers, developers and managers should be quick to embrace cloud computing or start thinking about a new line of work because it will happen with or without them. Resistance is futile...you will be assimilated.
For those of you interested in building your own cloud or a hybrid private-public cloud that is API compatible with Amazon, then take a look at the Eucalyptus open source project, which itself has just garnered $5.5M in funding to launch a company based on the software.
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