Cloud In 2012: The Awkward Teenage Years Are Upon Us

By James Staten

As 2011 begins to wind down we can look back on the progress made over the last eleven months with a lot of pride. The market stepped significantly forward with big gains in adoption by leaders Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Rackspace, significant growth in the use of clouds for big data, training, test and development, the creation of landmark new services and the dawning of the App-Internet era. Cloud technologies matured nearly across the board as did transparency, security and best practice use and adoption. But there’s much more growth ahead as the cloud is no longer a toddler but has entered the awkward teenage years. And much as found in human development the cloud is now beginning to fight for its own identity, independence and place in society. The next few years will be a painful period of rebellion, defiance, exploration, experimentation and undoubtedly explosive creativity. While many of us would prefer our kids go from the cute pre-teen period straight to adulthood, we don’t become who we are without surviving the teenage years. For infrastructure & operations professionals, charged with bringing predictability to our company’s use of IT, this coming era of cloud computing will push us well outside of our comfort zone. We’ve all lived through market transitions like this one before but probably have forgotten that we were teens when the technologies we helped cement in place during that year were too. Cloud computing won’t play out exactly like client-server or the Internet era did but there are strong similarities and the early years were the most painful. To that aim, it’s time to put our soothsayer’s hat back on and read the tarot for cloud in 2012. Here is what we expect over the next year and what you as the I&O parent should do about it.