Channel Partners Must Listen to the Clouds

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Today there are so many options when it comes to offering cloud related product solutions and services and the channel partners must look towards cloud with a clear focus.

As organizations look towards opportunities for improving IT efficiency and performance through centralization of resources, cloud computing is becoming one big option that can help them achieve this and because of this, its deployment has increased dramatically in the last few years with the maturation of technologies such as SOA, virtualization, grid computing, and management automation.

A natural outcome of this is what has become increasingly referred to as “cloud computing”, where a consumer of computational capabilities sets up or makes use of computing “in the cloud” (i.e. over a network) in a self-service manner, without direct involvement in how that computing is resourced. Initially referring to services provided by third-parties over the Web, cloud computing is now also evolving in a “private” variant whereby enterprises set up cloud-like, centralized shared infrastructure with automated capacity adjustment that internal departmental “customers” utilize in a self-service manner. Realization of efficiency, performance, and agility benefits is reinforcing this trend.

With mature, reliable, high-performance clustering mechanisms as well as pervasive, unified security and management, cloud related applications deliver the most effective dynamic resourcing in the industry. Modularity, sharability, and composability and user interaction technologies complement the dynamic resourcing to support a powerful self-service platform of reusable components.

These platform components are both easily managed by a central IT function and easily composed into applications by departments within the enterprise. There remain technologies to develop and practices to refine, but enterprises can make significant progress in achieving the benefits of cloud computing with products available today.

If we look back, the PCs and workstations of the 70s and 80s were a strong contrast, with computation occurring at the outermost nodes of the architecture. The ever improving connectivity and bandwidth driven by Internet technologies is bringing us back to greater centralization.

Both centralization and distribution have important merits for small and medium and even large enterprise IT infrastructure. Centralization of control enables consistency, economies of scale, and efficient rollout of innovations that are applicable across the enterprise.

On the other hand, distribution of control enables agility for departments, it enables them to go for swift decision making that is benefiting for their end customers as well, allowing flexibility to respond quickly to needs and imperatives specific to their roles within the organization. Optimizing the balance between centralization and distribution is an ongoing challenge for IT architecture, organization of the people who support that architecture, and organization of the people who use that architecture.

Client-server computing was the first big step toward more centralization from the world of distributed PCs and workstations. As the globally omnipresent, quality of Internet-based networking made client-server more viable and widespread, much of computing shifted to the server in a more centralized model.

And today we have a situation where cloud based models are being practiced at many organizations and in many different verticals such as BFSI, Telecom, Manufacturing and even healthcare. Moving forward, cloud is set to deliver bigger opportunities for the enterprise and hence it is the right time for channel partners to look towards the cloud with fervor.