Looking at clouds from both sides now

The shifting economics of IT has me pondering how all of these developments will impact how we should be educating our business information and analytics students — and all business students for that matter. The good news is that solid business skills are very relevant: negotiation, comparing service solutions to capital acquisitions, change management, services management and the list goes on.

By Michael Goul  

This week I am serving on a panel at the 8th IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing. It is co-located with a conference on big data and another on services computing. The panel’s topic is the shifting economics of services computing. Having done considerable work in the first decade of the 2000s (with some very smart people from Intel) to design new analytics-driven enterprise infrastructure stack capabilities for automatically determining dynamic negotiation strategies for cloud provisioning through service level Agreements (SLAs), I firmly put myself in the cloud skeptic camp. At the time, I didn't think the cloud was ready for enterprise prime time. Did you? If your eyes are glazing over from all this technical talk about clouds, please hold on. I am seeing clouds from another side now.

In the panel, I shared recent predictions regarding the cloud and enterprise computing. By 2018, enterprises will have half their infrastructure on cloud-based platforms, and 59 percent of total cloud workloads will be Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) workloads, up from 41 percent in 2013. Infrastructure-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service workloads are predicted to fall from 44 to 28 percent and 15 to 13 percent, respectively. The other elephant in the room at this conference is cloud-based, Big Data and Analytics (BDA) solutions — these solutions are growing three times faster than on-premises BDA infrastructure spend. During the panel, I talked about the arduous legalese that today’s cloud SLAs contain. Cloud solution contracts most certainly require a multi-disciplinary analysis involving technical personnel, lawyers, CIOs and business domain experts. When you add in BDA, you need data scientists, data engineers, privacy and security experts and maybe even supply chain specialists who understand how the concept of an enterprise computing value chain/network might apply.

Alas, a Stanford University study found that many businesses leveraging the cloud simply use the one click option to agree to all of the provider’s terms. Many predict large companies will have the most leverage in negotiating with cloud providers while small to medium-sized enterprises probably don’t yet have the bargaining power. But in the European Union, for example, there are emerging compliance requirements related to ensuring data privacy and security. In my panel presentation, I cited research that is at the most granular level of personal data — rules are attached related to what a person is willing to share and whether what is shared can by used by a company in data mining, sold to others, aggregated with other data and then sold, etc. My co-presenters discussed the emerging conceptualization of microservices and their potential.

Some feel the approach will challenge service-oriented architecture. Another discussed the potential impact of open source on cloud computing, SaaS and BDA. The success of Red Hat Software came up as an exemplar of how open source BDA will evolve. It is interesting that Red Hat just recently announced an exciting cloud offering, referring to it as an ‘OpenStack Cloud Deployment.’ Today I am pondering how all of these developments will impact how we should be educating our business information and analytics students — and all business students for that matter. If the most advanced BDA solutions are going to be cloud-based, then the cloud becomes central to innovation.

If data is moving to the cloud, then BDA solutions in the cloud will be closer to the data. If best of breed SaaS is rapidly configurable in the cloud, then embedding analytics like predictive models in enterprise software can be seamless. But what would all of this mean? Service level agreements will become more important than ever. The good news is that solid business skills are very relevant: negotiation, comparing service solutions to capital acquisitions, change management, services management and the list goes on. The hard work will probably begin this fall when curriculum committees and industry advisory boards start to grapple with continuous improvements. An advantage is that the information systems community can build off fundamental business skills in practical and timely use cases so that graduates can hit the ground running. Most students will probably be doing assignments in the cloud without a second thought. They won’t know anything different than seeing clouds from all sides. After all, that’s just good business.