Cloud Computing – The new nirvana or just the latest version?

Last week I mentioned that I would discuss Cloud Computing further and explain what it is and the issues that it raises. There are various names that this technology goes under but basically it is all quite simple – it’s application outsourcing. I’ll start this discussion with a little history lesson…

Now being a person of maturity I find this shift in solutions focus quite interesting – I'm afraid it's not that new, it's all happened before. 

Apparently social change cycles in human experience tend to be around 30 years in length. The reason for that is that’s the time taken to shift through a generation and is when the experience of one generation begins to be lost and allows new things to be considered – interesting.

Now just a bit less than 30 years ago I got into this industry by doing a Cobol programming course. I was a terrible programmer, still am, but I did find I was as good as the lecturer at de-bugging other student’s programs. The levels of detail required for programming I found rather dull and when I saw my first room full of mainframe code-cutters clattering over their green screens I was far from enthused.

I had been messing around with Commodore PET’s (Personal Electronic Transactor!) one of the original PC’s and loved the rapid turn-around that working with them allowed. I could fiddle and experiment and see instantly what the effects would be. This seemed far better than the endless batching and waiting that was required in the real world of commercial computing – on mainframes. 

Just around that time was when the IBM PC had been launched and I managed to get a job with a burgeoning PC support group in a South London Health Authority. This was the start of a frantic few years spent jumping from company to company as they each started installing PC’s.

There were a few things that were interesting about what was happening at the time in the companies where I worked:

• They all had large mainframe based IT departments involved in enormous projects.
  
• The IT departments were all way behind on providing the solutions promised to the users on the mainframe systems.
  
• The business managers hated the IT department.
  
• The PC team was set up to take away the PC noise from the real work being done by IT on the mainframe systems.
  
• We PC guys were the friends of the business managers – we helped them do what they wanted to do - quickly. We spoke their language.
  
• PC’s were not cheap but they could be bought by managers on their own budgets and this was not viewed as part of the IT mainframe based budget.
  
• As the PC’s took hold the mainframe became less important to the business managers.
  
• Eventually the PC’s would be brought back under the control of the IT department.
  
• We would all pack up move out and join a new company and do it all again!
  

What is interesting is that these circumstances have begun to repeat themselves – check it out. Go through the points above and replace mainframe with PC and PC with application providers.

History repeating itself? I think so…..tomorrow I’ll talk about what cloud computing does and doesn’t solve.