Definitely seeing accelerated movement into the Cloud being reported in the news these days! Alongside the likes of Amazon and Sage, for example, Google have not been slow to propel their own engine of change, as it were, with repeated announcements that printing from Google is taking to the Cloud.

This month, CloudPrint has been launched in beta, aimed primarily at mobile documents, which essentially means anywhere or at any time, a document in Google Docs or an email in Gmail can be opened via a mobile browser, ‘Print’ clicked from the drop down menu, and ready to be collected immediately upon arrival.

Driving the realisation that Cloud’s time has come is a combination of converging factors. Faster and wider broadband, cross-platform web technologies enabling multiple access, transfer and storage of unlimited complex data, and the increasing reliance on web channels or virtual platforms as an application resource in order to facilitate a proactive IT requirement.

We have already seen relatively straightforward consumer web based services, from hosted and web email, to online transactions, tax preparation, photo and album creation and today’s linking social networking sites in the continuing development of successful SaaS business applications.

Printing via your mobile represents another tangible example of adaptation to a ‘thin client’ approach to cloud computing, as is readily available via DesktopLive, where a basic monitor screen access to web based software (SaaS) removes the need for physical storage of application drivers and the connecting of hardware to software via a cable.

The end of the physically located desktop has been much talked about in recent times as the smartphone/tablet revolution continues and indeed, the Cloud, as a location-independent communications network is now really becoming better understood across the wider business community. But it’s likely that the static desktop will continue to operate alongside mobile, but increasingly more reliant on cloud based applications as data/media processes accelerate and complexify.

Analysts have predicted that with the arrival of increased high-speed bandwidth, which makes it practical to locate infrastructure remotely, and reacting to the current difficult economic climate, over three quarters of IT managers are said to favour SaaS and will move from a capital expenditure to opt, instead, for outsourcing IT by purchasing 40 per cent of their IT infrastructure as a service.

Gartner forecast that within 2 years, 12 per cent of the global software market will consist of Internet-based forms of SaaS and cloud computing offered by cloud vendors accompanied by intrinsic IT support . In addition, Cloud computing will, by necessity, intensify and enhance frameworks of greater cooperation and collaboration among a geographically-dispersed workforce at multiple locations, including any number of related associates outside a company firewall.

The prevailing consumer adoption of personal forms of cloud computing is inevitably, driving business to migrate to the cloud with adoption rates doubling from 2004 to 2008, with around a fifth of SMEs and a quarter of medium-size companies currently using SaaS.

According to a Gartner 2009 study, “ .. .nearly 90 per cent of organisations surveyed expect to maintain or grow their usage of software as a service (SaaS), citing cost-effectiveness and ease/speed of deployment as primary reasons for adoption.”

News that the well-known Sage business software company has just launched a cloud-based SaaS accounting product for both individuals and small business – as part of an “emerging web strategy” – is yet another significant step in the shift away from software installed on physical computers and the growing acceptance of a cloud-based marketplace.

Secured using 128-bit encryption and available only in the UK, the Software as a Service, entitled ‘SageOne’, offers three different versions, the ‘Cashbook’ basic package and an ‘Accounts’ edition featuring invoice creation tools on a monthly rate and an ‘Accountant’ version, payable per annum or free to existing Sage accountants’ club members.

Over the last fifteen years, the continuous IT services development of cloud computing to industrialise data information storage and access as a resource, as exemplified by a thin client platform, such as DesktopLive, is a result of the ongoing standardisation of core technologies like virtualisation, service-oriented architecture (SOA), and Web 2.0.

Formerly, the underpinning of a business service was limited to IT resources, which were wholly owned by the provider of that service and ultimately, meant a silo-based-approach to the management of system, network security, and IT support. Cloud computing allows the business service architecture to cross the organisational boundary and become a composition of various attributes, which are separately managed within different domains.

The drive by business towards reducing cost and increasing availability, yet exercising agility in the face of unprecedented growth of data generation and processing has been inexorably leading towards recognition of the need to undergo a proactive IT approach to assimilating cloud as a dynamically scalable resource solution.

Yet despite the obvious attractions of the reduced costs of running and maintaining internal IT infrastructure, IT managers have been traditionally reluctant to relinquish control by outsourcing IT and company applications to a cloud service provider. Companies have even been hesitant to push mission critical applications and data, such as ERP and even email to an external enterprise over which they have much less control.

Notwithstanding, the deep anxiety over transitioning production environment, either in part or whole, to the cloud, a fear of becoming too dependent upon even large and stable cloud service providers has often proved to be a far greater barrier to adopting new technologies than technological feasibility.

Migration to a cloud, which is invisible to users, as a reliable and efficient process without sacrificing the governance, management, and security essentials that enterprises have grown to depend upon, must include:

• Capturing both the state and data for applications and servers
• Storage and retention of this information to enable recovery if necessary
• The actual movement of applications and servers, potentially in real time
• Recovery and reconstitution of state and data for applications and servers, to both physical and virtual environments

As the launch of SageOne demonstrates, the growing use of SaaS applications for both strategic and non-strategic business use, such as email, project and portfolio management, etc. provide ample proof of the gradual maturing of attitude towards off-premise data access.

Elastic IT may be broadly seen as the evolution of proactive IT within a Cloud computing infrastructure. The transformation of data management as applications become more dynamic and infrastructure virtualised, means multiple domains of operational control, through a relationship based pay-as-you-go, business service.

However, long abiding issues still focus on network security and compliance, performance and reliability and the concern over relinquishing control of sensitive company IT assets off physical premises. If the end goal is to reduce cost, increase business agility and flexibility, and manage risk, experienced cloud vendor management solutions can provide intrinsic IT support to both a company’s existing IT infrastructure and a cloud computing architecture, as the principles of governance, management, and security become vital imperatives.

Growing understanding of the unprecedented performance and economic power of external clouds is crystallising within IT manager and executive forward planner considerations as they endeavour to address the specific challenges. Constructing a cloud-like architecture – or ‘internal cloud’ – within an organisation’s own data centre can provide equivalent performance and scale of economy within an enterprise’s own operating environment.

This essentially means remodelling existing, diverse data centres to function as an internal cloud, the architecture of which, would not adversely impact existing assets and processes.

It may very well be that the key requirements for deploying an internal cloud architecture could include:

• Managing existing diverse computer, storage, and networking platforms (including
multiple revisions, updates, and patch levels per platform)
• Managing a variety of multiple virtualisation platforms
• Providing service oriented features (design, measure, and maintain a catalogue of services,
chargeback, etc)
• Not disrupting security processes and procedures, existing application architectures, and
existing application code bases or configurations
• Being compatible with existing configuration management processes
• Being compatible with existing tracking, logging, and compliance systems
• Providing per-use resource cost metrics and usage metrics

Under the above types of operating processes, an internal cloud could provide the same “elastic IT” capacity, economies-of-scale, failure-tolerance, and cost transparency comparable to an external cloud. However, a key difference is that the cloud is behind a company firewall, within it’s own facility, and under company management control. An instantly more attractive and persuasive proposition of all is the utilisation of existing resources and IT support for existing applications.

It is envisaged that the growth of multiple internal clouds arising around specific business functions will drive the necessity for a decisive IT services development solution to be managed across the internal domains of control. The adoption of an internal cloud model can be viewed as a company’s necessary first bold step towards intelligent use of an external cloud resource and establishing a hybrid cloud.

The recent news of Oracle preparing to take on Google and Microsoft in a possible, unfolding drama for global brand colonisation and domination of the Cloud provisioning space, may be viewed as another decisive step in the steady ingress of Cloud at the core of strategic, proactive IT development.

There is some evidence to show that senior business executives are increasingly acknowledging the gradual shift in thinking towards infrastructure issues inherent in rapidly expanding and faster handling, storage, access and transfer of increasingly sophisticated info/media data.

The sea change has already been recognised by SMEs and most predominantly, the manufacturing, retail, distribution and transport industries. Significantly, global communications provider, Interactive Intelligence Inc, report that 64 per cent of UK C- Level executives have either actually deployed or are considering the implementation of a Cloud-based solution within the next five years.

The incremental acceptance of cloud as a resource service suggests that last year’s prediction by technology analysts, Gartner that, “ 20 per cent of businesses will own no IT assets by 2012” may not be as far-fetched as some might claim.

Companies considering a move to a cloud platform may well be attracted by its inherent, hybrid characteristics. It’s extremely unlikely that companies will migrate their entire IT infrastructure and applications across to the cloud. However, where organisations already feel comfortable and perfectly used to outsourcing IT for non-core activities with a key benefit of superior IT support whilst maintaining business-sensitive IT applications in-house, a near identical principle of utilising a hybrid cloud approach may be readily accepted and the preferred option.

According to some business analysts, hybrid cloud adoption in the UK is predicted to be the inevitable choice as ‘onDemand’ technology moves forward in the coming decade. The hybrid cloud solution, where both a private and public cloud share IT hosting duties with selected IT outsourced to a non-cloud platform and the remaining staying on-premise and managed internally, will be control-dependent on individual company planning and resources.

For many organisations however, altering their understanding of computing principles by its direction towards the cloud, is still an issue. They will need to come to terms with the opening up of how IT can be delivered and managed, which ultimately provides an infinitely expanded choice of cost-effective service or platform options, which are customised and utilised according to their individual business model and changing resource requirements.