Cloud computing, in which highly scalable virtualized infrastructure is made available over the internet, offers a significant opportunity for companies of all size to increase their return on investment (ROI) in information technology (IT). This is because cloud computing offers pay-as-you-go data storage and processing power that can expand or contract, essentially on demand.

However, before that ROI can be fully realized, changes must take place in the software ecosystem. First, application developers must be trained in order to take advantage of new programming models. Good cloud-capable applications are parallelizable, fault tolerant, and designed with abstractions around message passing and data access. The ability to support remote diagnostics is an important consideration as well.

Second, line-of-business (LOB) applications must be updated, or replaced, to account for the considerations described above. This is not always as bad as it sounds. For example, not surprisingly, collaboration and web-based applications have been the first to bridge this gap. 

Third, infrastructure and network operations people must be trained to handle the planning, deployment, and management of this new network resource class. Although cloud computing offers the lure of cheap and easy scalability, short-cuts must not be made when it comes to resource and capacity planning. But again, this is not as bad as it sounds: NetOps staff already understand this problem, they just need to be trained to apply their knowledge to the new problem domain.

Finally and this brings me to the real, near-term, opportunities service providers must evolve to fill-in, as well as straddle, these roles. ROI in cloud computing will only be achieved by an end-to-end understanding of infrastructure, application design, and deployment. Professionals, or small teams, with that sophisticated knowledge and experience will be in high demand. As in-house LOB and NetOps teams ramp-up, consultants will fill the gaps.

The key opportunities are twofold: first, for developers who build an understanding of network capacity planning, load balancing, and scalability. And second, for NetOps professionals who build an understanding of software architecture and design. That’s a tall order, but those individuals will be able to name their price!

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