Scality's Jerome Lecat deliers a Tuesday Keynote at WHD 2011
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — In a Tuesday afternoon keynote, Jerome Lecat of Scality presented a look into the future of the private cloud – and unusually far into the future, attempting to make predictions for 10 years down the road.
While working through the obligatory defining-the-cloud section of the presentation, he took the perspective that not many of the commonly referenced features of the cloud are really new developments.
What he finds compelling about the cloud is its potential as a “computing style,” in which all apps are deployed as SaaS on a shared infrastructure, completely detached from the physical hardware fabric.
A key driver of the change is computer behavior. The example he uses is cell phones. There was a time when people remembered all the phone numbers they needed to know. Before smartphones, people had to remember directions. Before email, people found a way to do business.
What is important about this is that these advances change user expectations. And this applies especially to IT users.
Modern IT expectations include ubiquitous access to applications.
He references some analyst predictions around the future markets for cloud services and specifically cloud storage – reaching into the many billions.
And he references a Gartner poll that showed many users planning to invest more in the public cloud, while very few are planning to invest in the private coud.
The security concerns that have for some been a barrier to public cloud adoption, he says, are the same objections people once had to things like e-commerce and VoIP. All of those concerns were overcome.
Ultimately, he says, the cloud is: for mission critical applications; outsourced infrastructure; outsourced IT; content distribution; distributed data; automatic operations; a new way to create wealth.
And the cloud is already here. Netflix, Zynga, Etsy, Salesforce.com and Google are just some of the huge projects running on the cloud already.
He makes a list of predictions for the cloud in 10 years:
- Most applications will be in the “cloud” style.
- Public clouds will outgrow private clouds in the enterprise.
- CIO and internal IT jobs will be about business processes, rather than infrastructure.
- Infrastructure will be handled by service providers.
- Applications will take resources from the cloud without manual intervention.
None of them is downright shocking, but a few of them are interesting, particularly the assertion that public clouds will outgrow private in the enterprise.
He has another list of what a service provider needs in order to operate in the cloud: scalability; very low TCO; true 100 percent availability, with no scheduled maintenance; an automatic system; and performance that isn’t limited by being in the cloud; and no migration.
He says there is a danger, however, of a cloud storage offering being designed in such a way that it will cost more to deliver the more it succeeds – if the cost of producing the storage ends up being more than you’re selling it for.
About Liam Eagle
Liam Eagle has worked as a contributor to the Web Host Industry Review since its inception in 2000, and as editor since 2003. He has been editor of the WHIR's print magazine since its launch. His daily involvement in the gathering and reporting of Web hosting news and his regular interaction with Web hosting leaders gives him an uncommonly broad appreciation of the issues and tends facing the business. Through his WHIR blog, Liam spots Web hosting trends and offers opinions on the industry-wide impacts of major developments and the motivation behind big announcements. Follow him on Twitter @liameagle
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