Link: http://davidsprottsblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/integrating-strategic-planning-for.html
From David Sprott's Blog
In October 2010 Gartner Group assessed that Cloud is at the top of the Hype Curve, the peak point of inflated expectations. But no one really needs this authoritative assessment to confirm an opinion that the industry in general is still in the early stages of Cloud Computing. An even more recent survey reveals that just 7% of organizations have approved cloud strategies and most organizations are now planning to establish strategic plans. So notwithstanding the cautionary reports, most government and commercial enterprises are planning to move rapidly to embrace the profound change inherent in this computing model.
As many organizations embark on strategic planning for Cloud Computing they should be strongly advised to think hard about the scope of their planning activity. What’s becoming very obvious is that we are in the midst of a significant paradigm shift. Cloud Computing is a major change in its own right, but in fact it is essentially only one phase in a much longer running cycle that commenced back around the year 2000 and continues to transition the entire industry from monolithic IT at all levels to service oriented everything.
Whilst Cloud is the “trend de jour”, a study of the leading platform offerings, particularly Amazon, Microsoft and Oracle, shows that Cloud is synonymous with SOA. These leading platforms are all completely service oriented and demonstrate sophisticated, next generation SOA implementations. All the platform capabilities are delivered and consumed as services and whilst the end user may choose to deploy conventionally architected applications, they would be highly suboptimal in terms of cost, portability and business agility.
At this juncture we also need to revisit the question of what is the Cloud. Not surprisingly, like most important trends, the concept is morphing as it matures. In the early stages of Cloud, the emphasis has been heavily focused on cost restructuring particularly in the areas of automation and standardization of technology infrastructure and rationalization and optimization of those resources. The PaaS and SaaS layers have been primarily used for conventional Web and commodity applications such as office productivity and email.
But the next stage of Cloud will be focused on business services and the operation of an ideal service architecture which rationalizes the morass that is the typical enterprise application portfolio. In this process the Cloud based services will align with customer facing business services to form the service oriented enterprise.
One might even wonder if the term Cloud will be relevant in just a few years time? The term is already coming under pressure because Cloud covers such a multitude of architecture concepts. Even the early standards work undertaken by NIST is rapidly dating as for example multi-tenant is no longer a unique identifying characteristic, and as the base models of private, hybrid and public are changing with the evolving with the development of the Virtual Private Cloud.
It seems probable therefore that the industry will go full circle and Cloud will be a primary enabler of the Service Oriented Enterprise, or, heaven forbid SOA 2.0.
This discourse is not wild speculation, IMO it is high probability. As a consequence I recommend that strategic planning for Cloud should be fully integrated with SOA planning. This is particularly the case when strategic ambitions are broader than purely technology infrastructure rationalization.
Further details see my Research Note:
Integrating Strategic Planning for Cloud and SOA
