What is driving the increasing adoption of Cloud Computing ?

The challenges associated with growing IT complexity and its impact on business agility has been the focus of recent conversations on this blog. There is clearly a need to address increasing operating costs associated with the delivery of IT services. Studies conducted by IBM, IDC and others has shown that over the last few years, management and administration costs have increased significantly against flat or decreasing new system spend, and marginal increases in power and cooling costs.

Cloud computing is the new consumption and deliver model inspired by consumer Internet services.  Underpinning cloud computing are proven capabilities of virtualization, automation and standardization, which is driving IT simplification and increased efficiency. Line of business executives are attracted to the self-service characteristics of Cloud, the new sourcing options it presents, and its economy of scale. Cloud essentially represents the industrialization of delivery for IT supported services. Leading cloud vendors like IBM provide clients with the flexibility to adopt the cloud solution appropriate for their organization, be it a Private Cloud, Public Cloud or a Hybrid Cloud including elements of both. In a recent newsletter, IDC predicted the increasing emergence of workload specific Clouds in 2013.

I see organizations adopting Cloud in 3 steps

1) Consolidation
2) Virtualization
3) Automation

Consolidation reduces server sprawl and results in a reduction in infrastructure complexity. Reduced complexity translates to less effort to operate and manage, which should improve operational costs and reduced total cost of ownership

By adopting a shared, virtualized infrastructure, IT organizations are able to significantly increase hardware utilization, resulting not only in a reduction in new hardware spend, but also with regards to associated costs like cooling and power. A virtualized infrastructure can also simplify application deployment and ongoing operation by removing physical resource boundaries.

Add automation to a consolidated and virtualized infrastructure, and you can dramatically reduce deployment cycles. Standardized delivery of IT services provides an opportunity to introduce granular metering and billing. This enables the flexible delivery of new processes and services.

IBM's PureApplication System is designed to accelerate cloud adoption. It enables customers to deploy Cloud services in less than 4 hours, from power on and connection to the client's network. It is integrated in the factory with advanced virtualization that enables IT resources to be shared among many applications. This results in more efficient utilization of IT resources and reduced hardware costs through economies of scale.

Patterns of Expertise, the ability to embed application configuration, deployment and lifecycle management best practices significantly reduces IT cycle times and management costs by enabling applications to be deployed with minimal skill in the shortest time possible.

Workload optimization algorithms and tight integration of all components, including software and hardware, results in a platform that can scale up and down to optimize IT resource utilization, with the network and storage system optimized to the workload.