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The Cloud Revolution: 3 Things IT Can Learn From Its Own History

NetApp

Think of a time in your professional life when you truly felt free.

Remember how you felt, with the power to decide your own path? You were able to apply your talents to something that really mattered to you, your company or your coworkers.

It’s possible that technology played a role. In fact, tech has always been a liberating force that compels us to try new ideas, to think of new things and to look at the world differently.

Remember The IBM PC?

IBM changed IT forever, because it put affordable computing into the hands of businesses, departments and individual employees.

PCs enabled analysis in business processes that resulted in better operating efficiency and faster innovation, significantly improving customer experiences.

Like PC, like Cloud—In 3 Ways

Cloud technologies are replaying the same whirlwind-liberation that PCs once brought. Here’s how...

1. The Freedom To Build

The PC liberated employees to build applications.

It freed them from the practical constraints that their IT departments put on them. It allowed them to independently pursue ideas and chase the ones that would make the biggest difference to the business.

Any technology that liberates thinking is unstoppable. PCs were the smartphone of that era: the must-have device, arguably the first viral technology.

Cloud is much the same. Five years ago, if an entrepreneurial employee wanted to build a new application to improve their business, they had to jump through many hoops. They had to convince their boss, get funding, convince IT for support, build the team, and spend months writing an application.

And then, they had to hope they’d get the desired result. How many employees do you think put themselves through that?

Today, a 22-year-old with a GitHub account and a credit card can spin up 100 virtual machines, download open-source software, and build an enterprise-scale application in a weekend. They don’t need IT’s help or permission. In fact, most times, IT doesn't even know that they're doing it.

As with the PC in the 1980s, this challenge pushes IT to figure out how to balance the power and the capabilities that the cloud model can bring. We need discipline to ensure continuity of the business—I’d bet that the 22-year-old's mobile application isn't compliant with the regulations that apply to your business.

2. The Opportunity To Lead

In the 1980s, PCs sprang up everywhere.

In organizations large and small, business apps were created. Remember Lotus and dBase? Companies evolved to run their businesses on networks of PCs running tenuous structures of ad hoc applications.

An application running in a business could well be sitting under somebody's desk. They would go on vacation, unplugging the PC—or sometimes it would fail. All of a sudden you couldn't ship product or you couldn't book orders, and nobody knew why.

We learned that with great freedom comes great responsibility. And we learned that unmanaged freedom leads to anarchy.

In order to keep the business running, that empowering freedom had to be balanced by maintaining discipline. It was not about controlling devices or equipment. Instead, it was about controlling the data.

In the 1990s, IT became a “point of aggregation,” where data was protected, gathered and managed: In other words, IT became the steward of the organization’s data.

Cloud brings another similar opportunity. If IT leaders ignore cloud, shadow IT will emerge throughout the organization. Employees will develop applications with very little understanding of what really matters in terms of security, compliance or regulatory requirements.

If IT embraces cloud, we channel a force we cannot resist. We strike a balance between the freedom to innovate and the discipline required to preserve the business.

This changes the way IT practitioners and leaders need to think about IT. Now it's not just about building and running data centers. It's about marshaling tools and applications that acquire, transform, apply and protect the data that runs the organization.

3. The Power to Disrupt

In the early 1980s, PCs burst on the IT scene. In the 1990s, network storage systems were introduced.

Then PC technology made its way into the data center. Linux matured over the last 20 years and became a viable alternative to the minicomputers and rack-mounted servers of the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Over time, PC technology came to dominate. It fundamentally changed the economics of how data centers were built. Through this transition, IT continued to learn the lesson that devices are disposable, but data endures.

Cloud is here to stay. Just like the PC was a fundamental disruptor in the 1980s, cloud will also have a deep and lasting impact on the future of IT.

I believe hybrid cloud is a defining IT trend. Most enterprises worldwide are already using multiple clouds for some part of their application landscape.

The economics and the operating benefit of using clouds for certain types of workloads are absolutely compelling. They can not be denied.

The Bottom Line

Clouds are built up of compute, network and storage—some is yours, and some isn’t. But what you always own is your data.

By moving your applications to a cloud, you’re freed to enjoy the benefits. But you aren’t relieved of the responsibility for that data.

The PC drove new models of data governance that extended out from the data centers to embrace this new, ubiquitous computing landscape. Realizing the full benefit of cloud will require the same transformation.

It also needs open minds to successfully extend IT beyond traditional boundaries.

What's your take? Weigh in with a comment below.

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The Cloud Revolution: 3 Things IT Can Learn From Its Own History ~ @NetApp_Biz

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