January 22, 2014 at 16:14The future of IT within companies: smaller, better, cheaper
The reason for writing this article was a few recent and unrelated events in my life. First, an optical fiber was laid in my house, and I became available to connect to the Internet at a speed of up to 350 Mb / s. After that, I thought about how much hard drive I needed in order to store home content - documents, travel photos, films and music. This thought, wandering around the back streets of consciousness, led to the question - do I need to buy a hard drive home if I have a high-quality, stable and high-speed Internet connection? Moreover, all my devices, mobile and not quite, have the ability to connect to the Internet at any time. Could it be easier to use a cloud storage service, which today has been divorced for every taste and budget?
I did not choose the cloud storage service, but my thought, while continuing to wander, sowed seeds of interest that sprouted sprouts of curiosity on its way - and how many companies are asking themselves the same question? Why would they buy servers, storage, routers, look for and equip a special room for all this, pay for electricity, buy and pay for the support of system and application software, hire IT staff to support and maintain all this, lay funds in the budget for continuous expansion and updating obsolete equipment, etc. etc? Instead of all this expensive fuss, you can simply connect all workstations to the Internet and use the services of cloud service providers that offer the most diverse range of services, from using the infrastructure of a cloud provider to using a full ERP system. After researching this issue, I got some facts and figures, which I wanted to share with you to further discuss the prospects of using cloud services to reduce IT costs.
To consider the advantages and disadvantages of using the services of cloud providers comprehensively, you must first understand the role of information technology in modern companies. It seems strange to me that the approach taken by some people working in the field of information technology. They pose the question as follows - What can a business give information technology? - And after receiving the answers, they begin to customize all business processes for one or another model of using information technologies. Correctly, this question should sound like this - What can information technology give to a business? I think that no one will argue with the fact that information technologies have taken the position for which they were originally created - support for the business, or rather automation of business operations + collection and storage of information about business operations. Despite all the complexity and seemingly scientific nature of modern information technologies, they perform a completely ordinary, utilitarian function. It is from this point of view that they are considered by business - information technology is not a tool for profit, but a way to reduce costs in one way or another. Looking at information technology in this paradigm, we will soon come to understand that IT cannot provide a competitive advantage for modern companies. Very simple: using IT, we will not be able to increase production and sales so that it will allow us to overtake our competitors. It is from this point of view that they are considered by business - information technology is not a tool for profit, but a way to reduce costs in one way or another. Looking at information technology in this paradigm, we will soon come to understand that IT cannot provide a competitive advantage for modern companies. Very simple: using IT, we will not be able to increase production and sales so that it will allow us to overtake our competitors. It is from this point of view that they are considered by business - information technology is not a tool for profit, but a way to reduce costs in one way or another. Looking at information technology in this paradigm, we will soon come to understand that IT cannot provide a competitive advantage for modern companies. Very simple: using IT, we will not be able to increase production and sales so that it will allow us to overtake our competitors.Small footnote: in addition to a couple of areas, for example, robotics and data analysis, where IT nevertheless occupies an applied role. The dotcom crisis clearly showed us this. But to reduce costs, and hence the final price, we can relatively easily. It is clear that almost any modern business needs information technology, without them it will not be able to achieve a sufficiently high level of organization and become immersed in chaos and confusion. This is a matter of course, which is taken into account when conducting any business, however, just as they take into account the rental of premises, electricity, water, etc. A small clarification: business is still understood as the real sector, and not financial speculation on the stock exchange, Farm Frenzy, facebook and other parasitic tinsel.
More and more small and medium-sized business owners are looking at information technology as a utility service, and not as a necessary part of the business. This is especially true of the newly opened business, as well as small and medium-sized businesses, where there is a need for basic infrastructure and / or standard office programs that ensure the implementation of simple business processes. By 2016, more than 75% of all new IT costs will be associated with cloud services, more than 70% of CIOs will consider the transition to a cloud solution as strategic task No. 1, and more than 80% of IT decisions will be made jointly with business leaders - these are prospects for the development of the cloud services market (SAP data, December 2013). Really, every business owner experiences acute signs of suffocation when looking at the server / server and bearded sweater maintenance bill. An even greater sadness overtakes him when he realizes that all this is borne by capital costs, he has to pay for support, the equipment becomes obsolete over time and fails. Therefore, when he faces the choice between one person in a suit who comes to him at the end of each month with a bottle of French cognac and an IT service bill or a whole department with obscure people who need to be hired, pay a salary, provide a workplace, plus a dedicated server room, with air conditioning, racks, servers that consume electricity at the speed of a huge iron that never turns off, then he, of course, is inclined to choose a nice young man in a suit. At the moment, this is not the dominant situation in the IT market, nor can it be called massive, but the trend clearly shows that the infrastructure part of IT will be moving to the clouds. The long-standing forecasts of apologists for cloud technologies, predicting mass migration of companies to the clouds, are starting to look not so fantastic and divorced from reality, which seemed to me until very recently.
Parallels published in November 2013 the second annual study of the cloud services market in demand among Russian small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). According to the company, over the year, the total amount of consumed cloud applications and infrastructure grew by 32% and amounted to 20.5 billion rubles. ($ 633 million). The most popular services were IaaS (7.8 billion rubles), SaaS (7.4 billion rubles) and solutions for web presence and web applications (4.2 billion rubles). Solutions for organizing collaboration and communications are noticeably lagging behind in popularity (1.1 billion rubles), but at the same time they have the greatest growth potential among all cloud services. By 2016, the market size will increase by almost 2.2 times and reach 55.6 billion rubles. ($ 1.7 billion).
I’ll stay a bit as a predictor and suppose that in 10-15 years almost all SMB companies will not have dedicated IT departments and departments, but will use public clouds. The SaaS model that they will use is not as developed at present as all cloud service consumers from the SMB sector would like, but within a few years this model of providing cloud services adapts to the vast majority of businesses, taking into account the specifics of each specific business area. The infrastructure in the SMB companies will be completely absent, and the universal connection to the Internet will help realize the long-held dream of mankind - not to go to work (this means work from home and BYOD). In 5 years, the use of public cloud services will become a massive, non-surprising phenomenon, an indisputable fact, expressed in dry statistical numbers. The role of the CIO in the companies of the SMB sector will lose clear boundaries of power and responsibility, will stretch and become a consultant. And this consultant will not be needed everywhere, but will remain only in those companies that will use an extensive list of public cloud services from various suppliers. In this case, the main IT skeet in SMB companies will be responsible for the integration of these services among themselves and interaction with various suppliers, i.e. turn into an IT manager, generally without subordinates and a budget. But what will happen to other people working in the field of IT? and will remain only in those companies that will use an extensive list of public cloud services from various providers. In this case, the main IT skeet in SMB companies will be responsible for the integration of these services among themselves and interaction with various suppliers, i.e. turn into an IT manager, generally without subordinates and a budget. But what will happen to other people working in the field of IT? and will remain only in those companies that will use an extensive list of public cloud services from various providers. In this case, the main IT skeet in SMB companies will be responsible for the integration of these services among themselves and interaction with various suppliers, i.e. turn into an IT manager, generally without subordinates and a budget. But what will happen to other people working in the field of IT?
All infrastructure specialists, and these are system administrators and network managers, massively migrate from warm, small and comfortable offices to huge data centers. There they will settle in warm control centers, go through the ITIL Tao, and learn ITSM Zen. Iron is enlarged and turned into standard cubes (as an example of the trend - the IBM PureX System), protocols and interfaces are becoming more standardized, virtualization is becoming the norm and the law, mega-clusters are appearing, fault tolerance is becoming comprehensive and mandatory. Unification of public services cannot be absolute, and in any case, it will require some kind of customization and perhaps the development of specific functionality for individual clients. This means that the whole variety of roles involved in developing client software, such as business analytics, system analysts, applied and system architects, technical writers, developers, testers, project managers, etc. will also move to the offices of cloud service providers. That is why all the largest integrators are now building data centers, which they plan to use as a platform for the provision of cloud services and, thus, stop being integrators, instead become a service provider, i.e. become a service organization. The difference here is fundamental - instead of selling hardware, software and implementation services, these companies will sell services for connecting to cloud services. It will be in their interests to interest potential customers in connecting and, most importantly, in the further use of cloud services. This, of course, greatly scares many integrators, since before that their sales model was based on the principle of - sold, calculated margin and forgotten. Thus,
Cnews has prepared a map of all these nature reserves and information technology oases.
Currently, there is a tendency towards the enlargement of data centers - the area, number of racks and power supply is increasing. Analysts rightly associate this with the ever-increasing role of the cloud-based IT service delivery model. A huge amount of iron, which is now in companies under the table, in server and mini-data centers will turn into the quality of giant, well-ventilated, robotic halls of mega-data centers, which will act as locomotives for the transition from the industrial model of society to the information one. The prospects are stunning.
Development in companies whose business is not related to IT will remain in minimal quantities only in those cases when it will really be necessary for objective reasons (for example, you need specific functionality that none of the providers of public SaaS have). Nevertheless, such companies will still relieve themselves of infrastructure hardships, preferring to pay the cloud service provider for the use of resources according to the PaaS model. However, the number of such companies will be vanishingly small. Everything that I described above applies to medium and small businesses. But if you look at large companies, corporations and holdings, then here we will see a completely different situation.
Large companies are usually companies with a history. The composition of this story also includes a huge number of the most diverse information systems developed and are being developed at present. Some of these companies are so large that no cloud service provider can provide for a reasonable amount of money the quality of service that is implied by the nature of the activities of any corporation. Despite this, large companies are also not alien to new trends and want to use cloud technology in their business. It should be noted right away that the main model for providing cloud services in large companies will be IaaS. This is due to the fact that the provision of cloud services according to the SaaS model implies the provision of a turnkey or semi-finished solution. It is almost impossible to organize a full-fledged process of large-scale development / refinement of IP in the form of a service, because The customer for the development of new IP and the refinement of the old is a business, and he is often a business analyst. The flow of these orders is constant, which forces them to constantly make changes to the IS and conduct a continuous dialogue with business users to verify the compliance of the developed product with customer requirements. At the same time, the service implies a limited amount of input and output information, which is often not enough to implement the required functionality. Based on this, it makes sense to consider the use of large companies of cloud services according to the IaaS model. To understand why this is necessary, large companies need to understand that there are two types of IT activities in such companies. Firstly, it is an operational activity to maintain the existing infrastructure - here the whole cloud is virtualization and optimization of the use of existing infrastructure. In fact, no service is needed here, but you just need to ensure that the performance and reliability requirements are met. The second type of activity is project activity, i.e. creation and development of new information systems to automate new business processes and business operations, as well as refinement of existing information systems to meet new business requirements. And here, large companies have problems - for development purposes, the rapid deployment of several environments (development, various test environments, etc.) is required as a separate set of system and / or application software with given computing resources. It is not always possible to quickly, on demand, provide these environments to developers, as a rule, this is preceded by a long formal process with clarification of all the details. On the one hand, a large number of projects and the dependence between them make them synchronize according to releases, but they do not synchronize them according to the terms of use of the infrastructure. Since the development time is different for everyone and the development process itself cannot always be determined by the timing, infrastructural risks begin to gain a great influence on the final release date of a complex information system with large internal and external relationships. On the other hand, desynchronization by the start and end dates of development and testing for different projects leads to the fact that the infrastructure is used inefficiently, the possibility of sharing infrastructure is not taken into account, the need for the required infrastructure is always higher and not true. This state of affairs provokes a constant postponement of release dates due to the inability to take into account the needs of all projects at one time and unreasonable infrastructure costs due to the impossibility of optimizing infrastructure requirements. The flip side is that after completion of the development and testing process, infrastructure resources are not always correctly released, and sometimes they completely forget to release them, which leads to inefficient use of existing infrastructure. This is a source of deaf business irritation with regard to infrastructure - they want to see a service that could quickly and without extra costs, upon request, provide infrastructure facilities and, if necessary, quickly mobilize them for the most necessary needs. The IaaS service delivery model is the best fit for the business desires in this case.
Moreover, there are all prerequisites for the implementation of this model in large companies - all large organizations are trying to centralize their own infrastructure. The reasons for this is that all companies are trying to get rid of an excessive number of disparate information systems, architecturally and platform to combine them by purpose and importance, centralize them in one place for manageability and monitoring, bring the stack of system and application software to common standards, unify the exchange between information systems using a service bus. This entails the centralization of data centers, the enlargement and reduction of their number by an order, the unification of infrastructure and universal virtualization. These data centers will be private, owned by the company, which, however, it doesn’t hinder to stand out as infrastructure units in large companies in a separate unit and logically unite around the provision of services according to the IaaS model. Simplified, this process will look as follows - at the request of projects, all the necessary infrastructure will be ready within 2-3 days. In this way, IaaS sets the standard for rapidly providing development and testing environments. Organizational and infrastructural divisions move further away from business and lose the ability to establish the dependence of business needs and infrastructure, because these two parameters will be untied from each other. The subject of dialogue for them will be the amount of necessary computing resources, a set of system and application software, requirements for the availability of information systems and data. Simplified, this process will look as follows - at the request of projects, all the necessary infrastructure will be ready within 2-3 days. In this way, IaaS sets the standard for rapidly providing development and testing environments. Organizational and infrastructural divisions move further away from business and lose the ability to establish the dependence of business needs and infrastructure, because these two parameters will be untied from each other. The subject of dialogue for them will be the amount of necessary computing resources, a set of system and application software, requirements for the availability of information systems and data. Simplified, this process will look as follows - at the request of projects, all the necessary infrastructure will be ready within 2-3 days. In this way, IaaS sets the standard for rapidly providing development and testing environments. Organizational and infrastructural divisions move further away from business and lose the ability to establish the dependence of business needs and infrastructure, because these two parameters will be untied from each other. The subject of dialogue for them will be the amount of necessary computing resources, a set of system and application software, requirements for the availability of information systems and data. Organizational and infrastructural divisions move further away from business and lose the ability to establish the dependence of business needs and infrastructure, because these two parameters will be untied from each other. The subject of dialogue for them will be the amount of necessary computing resources, a set of system and application software, requirements for the availability of information systems and data. Organizational and infrastructural divisions move further away from business and lose the ability to establish the dependence of business needs and infrastructure, because these two parameters will be untied from each other. The subject of dialogue for them will be the amount of necessary computing resources, a set of system and application software, requirements for the availability of information systems and data.
Numerous administration departments (network, system, databases, application servers, backup systems, automatic telephone exchanges, etc.) will form an organic symbiosis with the data center, will be located around and simultaneously on top of it, form a kind of hemisphere in the center of which the data center will be located. Project activities in large organizations will be a separate unit where development will be carried out, mainly on their own, with the involvement of integrators only if the company has no own experience in this field - nothing will change here.
In the Russian personnel market, the number of vacancies related to cloud computing in the period from 2012 to 2015 will increase by 158% to 162.4 thousand people. This is stated in a joint study by IDC and Microsoft, which gives similar estimates for other world countries. This does not mean the emergence of new jobs, but rather the transformation of existing jobs and assigning them to the field of cloud computing. Do not flatter yourself that cloud technologies will rekindle personnel hunger in the IT market - in fact, nothing new appears, transformation and consolidation of old, unchanged processes takes place. It is not worthwhile to rely on the increase in salaries for specialists working in this field, since only a small part of the technologies related to the provision of cloud services are truly new.
A pleasant surprise for me was the fact that our state began to pay attention to new technologies and decided to think about their use. In general, our state has become more modern and enlightened, especially with regard to information technology. Thank you very much for the Information Society (2011-2020) program alone.
As I understand it, the state has far-reaching plans to build its own data centers and centralize all state information systems in them. This is indicated by the fact that the Ministry of Telecommunications and Mass Communications on April 29, 2013 published a technical task for the implementation of research on the topic “Regulatory support of the possibility of using cloud technologies by state authorities and local governments”.
The document notes the growing popularity of cloud computing technologies and its advantages, and the agency calls the transition promising for state bodies and local governments to the clouds. The lack of regulatory regulation of the use of cloud technologies in the Ministry of Communications is called the main deterrent to their use in government agencies.
The Ministry of Communications concludes that, in general, there is no normative legal act establishing the basic rules for the use of clouds, including requirements for service level agreements, etc. In this regard, the agency sees it as a necessary task to prepare proposals and legal acts on the use of clouds in government agencies. To solve it, the R&D executor will have to analyze the advantages of using cloud technologies in the activities of government agencies, including saving the budget by reducing equipment costs and increasing the efficiency of the organization’s computing resources, using a comparative analysis of existing cloud services models - SaaS, IaaS and PaaS and cloud deployment models - private and public, taking into account the strengths and weaknesses of each of them.
To summarize, I would not want to use banal phrases about the growing interest and maturation of the cloud services market. In fact, I would like to believe that the format and capabilities of cloud services will really allow the whole society to be informational.
It should be noted that all of the above applies to the subjects of the Russian Federation, where the culture of using IT is quite developed.
A full study of Parallels SMB Cloud Insights is available on the Parallels website .
Gartner Report on IaaS 2013 .
The terms of reference for the implementation of research on the topic "Regulatory support for the use of cloud technology by state authorities and local governments."
I did not choose the cloud storage service, but my thought, while continuing to wander, sowed seeds of interest that sprouted sprouts of curiosity on its way - and how many companies are asking themselves the same question? Why would they buy servers, storage, routers, look for and equip a special room for all this, pay for electricity, buy and pay for the support of system and application software, hire IT staff to support and maintain all this, lay funds in the budget for continuous expansion and updating obsolete equipment, etc. etc? Instead of all this expensive fuss, you can simply connect all workstations to the Internet and use the services of cloud service providers that offer the most diverse range of services, from using the infrastructure of a cloud provider to using a full ERP system. After researching this issue, I got some facts and figures, which I wanted to share with you to further discuss the prospects of using cloud services to reduce IT costs.
To consider the advantages and disadvantages of using the services of cloud providers comprehensively, you must first understand the role of information technology in modern companies. It seems strange to me that the approach taken by some people working in the field of information technology. They pose the question as follows - What can a business give information technology? - And after receiving the answers, they begin to customize all business processes for one or another model of using information technologies. Correctly, this question should sound like this - What can information technology give to a business? I think that no one will argue with the fact that information technologies have taken the position for which they were originally created - support for the business, or rather automation of business operations + collection and storage of information about business operations. Despite all the complexity and seemingly scientific nature of modern information technologies, they perform a completely ordinary, utilitarian function. It is from this point of view that they are considered by business - information technology is not a tool for profit, but a way to reduce costs in one way or another. Looking at information technology in this paradigm, we will soon come to understand that IT cannot provide a competitive advantage for modern companies. Very simple: using IT, we will not be able to increase production and sales so that it will allow us to overtake our competitors. It is from this point of view that they are considered by business - information technology is not a tool for profit, but a way to reduce costs in one way or another. Looking at information technology in this paradigm, we will soon come to understand that IT cannot provide a competitive advantage for modern companies. Very simple: using IT, we will not be able to increase production and sales so that it will allow us to overtake our competitors. It is from this point of view that they are considered by business - information technology is not a tool for profit, but a way to reduce costs in one way or another. Looking at information technology in this paradigm, we will soon come to understand that IT cannot provide a competitive advantage for modern companies. Very simple: using IT, we will not be able to increase production and sales so that it will allow us to overtake our competitors.Small footnote: in addition to a couple of areas, for example, robotics and data analysis, where IT nevertheless occupies an applied role. The dotcom crisis clearly showed us this. But to reduce costs, and hence the final price, we can relatively easily. It is clear that almost any modern business needs information technology, without them it will not be able to achieve a sufficiently high level of organization and become immersed in chaos and confusion. This is a matter of course, which is taken into account when conducting any business, however, just as they take into account the rental of premises, electricity, water, etc. A small clarification: business is still understood as the real sector, and not financial speculation on the stock exchange, Farm Frenzy, facebook and other parasitic tinsel.
More and more small and medium-sized business owners are looking at information technology as a utility service, and not as a necessary part of the business. This is especially true of the newly opened business, as well as small and medium-sized businesses, where there is a need for basic infrastructure and / or standard office programs that ensure the implementation of simple business processes. By 2016, more than 75% of all new IT costs will be associated with cloud services, more than 70% of CIOs will consider the transition to a cloud solution as strategic task No. 1, and more than 80% of IT decisions will be made jointly with business leaders - these are prospects for the development of the cloud services market (SAP data, December 2013). Really, every business owner experiences acute signs of suffocation when looking at the server / server and bearded sweater maintenance bill. An even greater sadness overtakes him when he realizes that all this is borne by capital costs, he has to pay for support, the equipment becomes obsolete over time and fails. Therefore, when he faces the choice between one person in a suit who comes to him at the end of each month with a bottle of French cognac and an IT service bill or a whole department with obscure people who need to be hired, pay a salary, provide a workplace, plus a dedicated server room, with air conditioning, racks, servers that consume electricity at the speed of a huge iron that never turns off, then he, of course, is inclined to choose a nice young man in a suit. At the moment, this is not the dominant situation in the IT market, nor can it be called massive, but the trend clearly shows that the infrastructure part of IT will be moving to the clouds. The long-standing forecasts of apologists for cloud technologies, predicting mass migration of companies to the clouds, are starting to look not so fantastic and divorced from reality, which seemed to me until very recently.
Parallels published in November 2013 the second annual study of the cloud services market in demand among Russian small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). According to the company, over the year, the total amount of consumed cloud applications and infrastructure grew by 32% and amounted to 20.5 billion rubles. ($ 633 million). The most popular services were IaaS (7.8 billion rubles), SaaS (7.4 billion rubles) and solutions for web presence and web applications (4.2 billion rubles). Solutions for organizing collaboration and communications are noticeably lagging behind in popularity (1.1 billion rubles), but at the same time they have the greatest growth potential among all cloud services. By 2016, the market size will increase by almost 2.2 times and reach 55.6 billion rubles. ($ 1.7 billion).
I’ll stay a bit as a predictor and suppose that in 10-15 years almost all SMB companies will not have dedicated IT departments and departments, but will use public clouds. The SaaS model that they will use is not as developed at present as all cloud service consumers from the SMB sector would like, but within a few years this model of providing cloud services adapts to the vast majority of businesses, taking into account the specifics of each specific business area. The infrastructure in the SMB companies will be completely absent, and the universal connection to the Internet will help realize the long-held dream of mankind - not to go to work (this means work from home and BYOD). In 5 years, the use of public cloud services will become a massive, non-surprising phenomenon, an indisputable fact, expressed in dry statistical numbers. The role of the CIO in the companies of the SMB sector will lose clear boundaries of power and responsibility, will stretch and become a consultant. And this consultant will not be needed everywhere, but will remain only in those companies that will use an extensive list of public cloud services from various suppliers. In this case, the main IT skeet in SMB companies will be responsible for the integration of these services among themselves and interaction with various suppliers, i.e. turn into an IT manager, generally without subordinates and a budget. But what will happen to other people working in the field of IT? and will remain only in those companies that will use an extensive list of public cloud services from various providers. In this case, the main IT skeet in SMB companies will be responsible for the integration of these services among themselves and interaction with various suppliers, i.e. turn into an IT manager, generally without subordinates and a budget. But what will happen to other people working in the field of IT? and will remain only in those companies that will use an extensive list of public cloud services from various providers. In this case, the main IT skeet in SMB companies will be responsible for the integration of these services among themselves and interaction with various suppliers, i.e. turn into an IT manager, generally without subordinates and a budget. But what will happen to other people working in the field of IT?
All infrastructure specialists, and these are system administrators and network managers, massively migrate from warm, small and comfortable offices to huge data centers. There they will settle in warm control centers, go through the ITIL Tao, and learn ITSM Zen. Iron is enlarged and turned into standard cubes (as an example of the trend - the IBM PureX System), protocols and interfaces are becoming more standardized, virtualization is becoming the norm and the law, mega-clusters are appearing, fault tolerance is becoming comprehensive and mandatory. Unification of public services cannot be absolute, and in any case, it will require some kind of customization and perhaps the development of specific functionality for individual clients. This means that the whole variety of roles involved in developing client software, such as business analytics, system analysts, applied and system architects, technical writers, developers, testers, project managers, etc. will also move to the offices of cloud service providers. That is why all the largest integrators are now building data centers, which they plan to use as a platform for the provision of cloud services and, thus, stop being integrators, instead become a service provider, i.e. become a service organization. The difference here is fundamental - instead of selling hardware, software and implementation services, these companies will sell services for connecting to cloud services. It will be in their interests to interest potential customers in connecting and, most importantly, in the further use of cloud services. This, of course, greatly scares many integrators, since before that their sales model was based on the principle of - sold, calculated margin and forgotten. Thus,
Cnews has prepared a map of all these nature reserves and information technology oases.
Currently, there is a tendency towards the enlargement of data centers - the area, number of racks and power supply is increasing. Analysts rightly associate this with the ever-increasing role of the cloud-based IT service delivery model. A huge amount of iron, which is now in companies under the table, in server and mini-data centers will turn into the quality of giant, well-ventilated, robotic halls of mega-data centers, which will act as locomotives for the transition from the industrial model of society to the information one. The prospects are stunning.
Development in companies whose business is not related to IT will remain in minimal quantities only in those cases when it will really be necessary for objective reasons (for example, you need specific functionality that none of the providers of public SaaS have). Nevertheless, such companies will still relieve themselves of infrastructure hardships, preferring to pay the cloud service provider for the use of resources according to the PaaS model. However, the number of such companies will be vanishingly small. Everything that I described above applies to medium and small businesses. But if you look at large companies, corporations and holdings, then here we will see a completely different situation.
Large companies are usually companies with a history. The composition of this story also includes a huge number of the most diverse information systems developed and are being developed at present. Some of these companies are so large that no cloud service provider can provide for a reasonable amount of money the quality of service that is implied by the nature of the activities of any corporation. Despite this, large companies are also not alien to new trends and want to use cloud technology in their business. It should be noted right away that the main model for providing cloud services in large companies will be IaaS. This is due to the fact that the provision of cloud services according to the SaaS model implies the provision of a turnkey or semi-finished solution. It is almost impossible to organize a full-fledged process of large-scale development / refinement of IP in the form of a service, because The customer for the development of new IP and the refinement of the old is a business, and he is often a business analyst. The flow of these orders is constant, which forces them to constantly make changes to the IS and conduct a continuous dialogue with business users to verify the compliance of the developed product with customer requirements. At the same time, the service implies a limited amount of input and output information, which is often not enough to implement the required functionality. Based on this, it makes sense to consider the use of large companies of cloud services according to the IaaS model. To understand why this is necessary, large companies need to understand that there are two types of IT activities in such companies. Firstly, it is an operational activity to maintain the existing infrastructure - here the whole cloud is virtualization and optimization of the use of existing infrastructure. In fact, no service is needed here, but you just need to ensure that the performance and reliability requirements are met. The second type of activity is project activity, i.e. creation and development of new information systems to automate new business processes and business operations, as well as refinement of existing information systems to meet new business requirements. And here, large companies have problems - for development purposes, the rapid deployment of several environments (development, various test environments, etc.) is required as a separate set of system and / or application software with given computing resources. It is not always possible to quickly, on demand, provide these environments to developers, as a rule, this is preceded by a long formal process with clarification of all the details. On the one hand, a large number of projects and the dependence between them make them synchronize according to releases, but they do not synchronize them according to the terms of use of the infrastructure. Since the development time is different for everyone and the development process itself cannot always be determined by the timing, infrastructural risks begin to gain a great influence on the final release date of a complex information system with large internal and external relationships. On the other hand, desynchronization by the start and end dates of development and testing for different projects leads to the fact that the infrastructure is used inefficiently, the possibility of sharing infrastructure is not taken into account, the need for the required infrastructure is always higher and not true. This state of affairs provokes a constant postponement of release dates due to the inability to take into account the needs of all projects at one time and unreasonable infrastructure costs due to the impossibility of optimizing infrastructure requirements. The flip side is that after completion of the development and testing process, infrastructure resources are not always correctly released, and sometimes they completely forget to release them, which leads to inefficient use of existing infrastructure. This is a source of deaf business irritation with regard to infrastructure - they want to see a service that could quickly and without extra costs, upon request, provide infrastructure facilities and, if necessary, quickly mobilize them for the most necessary needs. The IaaS service delivery model is the best fit for the business desires in this case.
Moreover, there are all prerequisites for the implementation of this model in large companies - all large organizations are trying to centralize their own infrastructure. The reasons for this is that all companies are trying to get rid of an excessive number of disparate information systems, architecturally and platform to combine them by purpose and importance, centralize them in one place for manageability and monitoring, bring the stack of system and application software to common standards, unify the exchange between information systems using a service bus. This entails the centralization of data centers, the enlargement and reduction of their number by an order, the unification of infrastructure and universal virtualization. These data centers will be private, owned by the company, which, however, it doesn’t hinder to stand out as infrastructure units in large companies in a separate unit and logically unite around the provision of services according to the IaaS model. Simplified, this process will look as follows - at the request of projects, all the necessary infrastructure will be ready within 2-3 days. In this way, IaaS sets the standard for rapidly providing development and testing environments. Organizational and infrastructural divisions move further away from business and lose the ability to establish the dependence of business needs and infrastructure, because these two parameters will be untied from each other. The subject of dialogue for them will be the amount of necessary computing resources, a set of system and application software, requirements for the availability of information systems and data. Simplified, this process will look as follows - at the request of projects, all the necessary infrastructure will be ready within 2-3 days. In this way, IaaS sets the standard for rapidly providing development and testing environments. Organizational and infrastructural divisions move further away from business and lose the ability to establish the dependence of business needs and infrastructure, because these two parameters will be untied from each other. The subject of dialogue for them will be the amount of necessary computing resources, a set of system and application software, requirements for the availability of information systems and data. Simplified, this process will look as follows - at the request of projects, all the necessary infrastructure will be ready within 2-3 days. In this way, IaaS sets the standard for rapidly providing development and testing environments. Organizational and infrastructural divisions move further away from business and lose the ability to establish the dependence of business needs and infrastructure, because these two parameters will be untied from each other. The subject of dialogue for them will be the amount of necessary computing resources, a set of system and application software, requirements for the availability of information systems and data. Organizational and infrastructural divisions move further away from business and lose the ability to establish the dependence of business needs and infrastructure, because these two parameters will be untied from each other. The subject of dialogue for them will be the amount of necessary computing resources, a set of system and application software, requirements for the availability of information systems and data. Organizational and infrastructural divisions move further away from business and lose the ability to establish the dependence of business needs and infrastructure, because these two parameters will be untied from each other. The subject of dialogue for them will be the amount of necessary computing resources, a set of system and application software, requirements for the availability of information systems and data.
Numerous administration departments (network, system, databases, application servers, backup systems, automatic telephone exchanges, etc.) will form an organic symbiosis with the data center, will be located around and simultaneously on top of it, form a kind of hemisphere in the center of which the data center will be located. Project activities in large organizations will be a separate unit where development will be carried out, mainly on their own, with the involvement of integrators only if the company has no own experience in this field - nothing will change here.
In the Russian personnel market, the number of vacancies related to cloud computing in the period from 2012 to 2015 will increase by 158% to 162.4 thousand people. This is stated in a joint study by IDC and Microsoft, which gives similar estimates for other world countries. This does not mean the emergence of new jobs, but rather the transformation of existing jobs and assigning them to the field of cloud computing. Do not flatter yourself that cloud technologies will rekindle personnel hunger in the IT market - in fact, nothing new appears, transformation and consolidation of old, unchanged processes takes place. It is not worthwhile to rely on the increase in salaries for specialists working in this field, since only a small part of the technologies related to the provision of cloud services are truly new.
A pleasant surprise for me was the fact that our state began to pay attention to new technologies and decided to think about their use. In general, our state has become more modern and enlightened, especially with regard to information technology. Thank you very much for the Information Society (2011-2020) program alone.
As I understand it, the state has far-reaching plans to build its own data centers and centralize all state information systems in them. This is indicated by the fact that the Ministry of Telecommunications and Mass Communications on April 29, 2013 published a technical task for the implementation of research on the topic “Regulatory support of the possibility of using cloud technologies by state authorities and local governments”.
The document notes the growing popularity of cloud computing technologies and its advantages, and the agency calls the transition promising for state bodies and local governments to the clouds. The lack of regulatory regulation of the use of cloud technologies in the Ministry of Communications is called the main deterrent to their use in government agencies.
The Ministry of Communications concludes that, in general, there is no normative legal act establishing the basic rules for the use of clouds, including requirements for service level agreements, etc. In this regard, the agency sees it as a necessary task to prepare proposals and legal acts on the use of clouds in government agencies. To solve it, the R&D executor will have to analyze the advantages of using cloud technologies in the activities of government agencies, including saving the budget by reducing equipment costs and increasing the efficiency of the organization’s computing resources, using a comparative analysis of existing cloud services models - SaaS, IaaS and PaaS and cloud deployment models - private and public, taking into account the strengths and weaknesses of each of them.
To summarize, I would not want to use banal phrases about the growing interest and maturation of the cloud services market. In fact, I would like to believe that the format and capabilities of cloud services will really allow the whole society to be informational.
It should be noted that all of the above applies to the subjects of the Russian Federation, where the culture of using IT is quite developed.
A full study of Parallels SMB Cloud Insights is available on the Parallels website .
Gartner Report on IaaS 2013 .
The terms of reference for the implementation of research on the topic "Regulatory support for the use of cloud technology by state authorities and local governments."