Cloud by Default: A Business Imperative
Developing Applications that can be used anywhere

We are hearing more and more about the Cloud as the "next generation platform although, truth to tell, it isn't so dissimilar in concept to the "bureau computing" services of the 1980s. Even modern innovations such as virtualised services were available back then - "virtual machines" for business automation weren't invented by Java and VM Ware but for VM CMS on the mainframe.

What this means is that the Cloud Computing concept is more mature than you might think. It is a resilient and cost-effective platform that suits Agile organisations because it can often be paid for out of OpEx rather than CapEx budgets and can respond to changing business conditions and volumes in something approaching real time. If a successful product placement, say, suddenly means there are  unexpected demands on the capacity of your systems, with cloud, you simply buy more cloud services with your credit card (although there are governance issues to
deal with - without, of course, compromising this agility).

Taking a step back, however, and Cloud can be seen as just another step on the journey of business automation towards complete abstraction of the technology which underlies automated businesses.

The message from this event will be that all developments should be made using  service-oriented architectures and architected so they can run on Cloud platforms, by default, unless there are positive considerations preventing this, even if there is no intention to run them on a cloud platform in the foreseeable future. The implication is that automated systems architected this way will have desirable characteristics quite apart from any possible Cloud deployment:

• They will abstract the underlying technology from the business service it enables. This means that changing technology and/or vendor if the technology landscape changes will be easier than it would be if the service was locked into a particular technology.
• They will be inherently service-oriented, in practice. This fits with the way technology is evolving and helps to bridge the gap between technology and business users (who can deal with technology simply as just another business service).
• Provisioning and capacity management is cheaper and easier on cloud platforms even if they are entirely private and restricted to particular users within your firewall. If you have built for the cloud, this option is always available and will probably be more effective than extending conventional architectures.

If or when the cloud does become ubiquitous, cloud-friendly systems will be ready to exploit it.

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