The Cloud Is an Attitude, Not a Place

The cloud is an attitude, not a place

Ian Miller

Spatial Vision

Executive Summary

The cloud is a much-hyped idea at present, which seems to promise low costs, quick time to market and avoidance of the complexity of enterprise IT environments. I believe however that the benefits of cloud come not from moving current systems, approaches and thinking to a cloud location, but by fundamentally changing your attitude to how information and services can be delivered in this new environment.

In this presentation, I’ll discuss the various types of services provided “in the cloud”, including Infrastructure As A Service (IaaS), Platform As A Service (PaaS) and Software As A Service (SaaS) and what each of these offers organisations.

I’ll look at the types of cloud migration projects we’re seeing in government at present and the challenges they’re facing in trying to move existing systems to the cloud. Key issues are, not surprisingly, authentication and integration. A particular challenge occurs when an organisation decides to move one (or a closely related set) of systems to the cloud, but where these are heavily dependent on enterprise services which are not migrating.

PaaS and SaaS offerings are better placed to help organisations change their approach to information systems in the cloud and probably represent the mid to long term future of cloud. PaaS however is only available for limited platforms at present and SaaSofferings are focused on common capabilities (such as CRM, finance, email etc), with neither yet delivering the breadth or depth required by government for specific business systems.

Overlaying these issues is a question of if/how current IT groups will be involved in the cloud delivery of services – will business units bypass their IT group and deal directly with cloud providers, will the IT group continue to manage all systems but in the cloud rather than on premises or something in between?

I’ll offer up my observations of this fledgling transition and discuss the approaches I think will be successful and those less so.

FORMATTING GUIDELINES

Upon approval of your submission, we would like to publish your Executive Summary along with your photo and biography on the Program Page of the website. Please format your Executive Summary using the follow guidelines.

Headings

No more than 2 levels of headings

• Level 1: Arial 12 point bold, un-numbered, left aligned, sentence case

• Level 2: Arial 11 point bold, un-numbered, left aligned, sentence case.

Body text:

Arial 11pt, left aligned, single spaced. Blank lines before and after headings,

Reference List:

Alphabetical order by first author. Use Aria 10pt, left aligned, hanging indent 0.5cm, no blank lines

eg:

Brown, T. & Telec, J. (2004).Computers and the future of learning. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall

Davidson, P. (2005). The new technologies: Finding collaborative possibilities. Journal of Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia, 4(1), 134-168.