Application hosting in the cloud frontier
By Bennett Bauer, Enterprise Services WW Marketing
Life in the world of the IT leader just keeps getting better! List all of the legacy infrastructure and applications that that you have to keep alive, add to that new application requirements from your company’s business leaders, then keeping up with all the company employees who want to sneak in consumer devices and applications, and things couldn’t get any more exciting … right? Not quite.
Now comes IT in the cloud! Oh my, you say, should you heed the warning lights and try to slow down or put the brakes on the movement because you already have your hands full? The answer is, that you as the “broker” of IT
services from all over creation need two things:
- Solid application hosting in the traditional sense for applications that are not ready for the cloud and may never be because the cost of modernizing or decommissioning them is just too high.
- A plan to pilot and implement cloud where you can and demonstrate innovation to your leadership and other stakeholders.
With maybe 30% of existing applications in your shop architected in a way so that they can function in a cloud model, a large population of your applications will persist in the traditional hosting model. Leads to the next question, doesn’t it? Where do you go to get help with both things—a balanced approach to the “hybrid” IT environment? Take a look at my recent viewpoint paper “Cloud Computing: Myths and Realities” to get a perspective on these questions and more.
