This is my first attempt of blogging a non-technical topic (non-technical but still related to technology) since I never felt it is my cup of tea. However the recent changes & developments which I am witnessing around me has provoked a lot of new thoughts in me which I wanted to pen down for my own reference & for the benefit of others who think alike.
But before I start, a disclaimer
“This is a personal weblog. The opinions expressed here represent my own and not those of my employer. In addition, my thoughts and opinions change from time to time…I consider this a necessary consequence of having an open mind. This weblog is intended to provide a semi-permanent point in time snapshot and manifestation of the various memes running around my brain, and as such any thoughts and opinions expressed within out-of-date posts may not the same, nor even similar, to those I may hold today. “
Since past couple of years or even more we have been hearing a lot of buzz on cloud & there is cloud all around us. The more important fact to realize is, cloud is no longer a buzz but it is now a Reality & if we as IT pros ignore this fact we are going to miss out the boat. Huge Tech companies have made large investments to make it a reality now & businesses have even started to realize the cost savings & benefits out of cloud.
While there is enough proof & content out there to prove on how business can benefit from cloud, I like the hotel analogy which I can relate easily. Being consultants or tourists, we like to travel places but do we have to buy real estate every place we visit to stay. Thanks to the hotels we just book the room, checkin at the desired time & check out when u leave & pay for the days you have spent there. Just imagine, how limited our travel or our reach would have been if hotels didn’t exist & we were supposed to buy a room every place we visit.
Similarly, the business can now think of growing their reach by adopting to cloud & not worrying about the cost of data center, real estate, server, RAM, CPUs, storage etc. Businesses can now afford to experiment or innovate even more with IT since the cost of spinning a VMs in cloud is negligible & if they fail they aren’t going to lose much.
The most strong argument which goes against the cloud is data security. However I am assuming there would have been a same argument when internet was evolving, sending data packets outside your organization was it safe? But today, Can organizations grow or even survive without their presence in internet? There are & will be processes, protocols developed for data security in cloud.
However are IT Pros ready for this Cloud Revolution. We are so much in love with our on-premise technologies & that is our comfort zone which has improved & matured over a period of time to become more & more perfect & easy to work with. While the road to cloud is not so matured & still evolving.
An IT pro like myself might be reluctant to move to cloud since we are going out of our comfort zone, we have invested years of our time to learn & become expert on a product or technology & now we need to move on to something else. Further there are some gaps between on-premise technology where features are available out of the box & in cloud where we are expected to code it.
The bad news is whether we like it or not it is coming our way & at a rapid pace. For instance, the features which were not available 6 months back are now available & as I witness, the offerings on cloud might mature at rapid pace then the time taken by their respective on-premise offerings since the Product Teams exactly knows which features are liked by the consumers the most.
As I see, we are in the times who are witnessing the cloud revolution & we should take every opportunity to learn cloud before it’s too late rather than ignoring it, assuming it is still not matured yet. In 2000’s people who can spell .Net were hired & it was a skillset which lasted long & was worth the investment of time which gave & is still giving people handsome returns. Cloud skillset is definitely one such investment which is going to give returns to IT Pros for a very long time.
To conclude, I will leave you with the following thought
You can either witness this change or “Be the change”.
Hope this helps !!!
Parikshit Savjani
Premier Field Engineer