IT Infrastructure And Operations: The Next Five Years

Interest in cloud technology and cloud economics abounds. While the technology delivers immediate reductions in capital costs, Forrester believes that cloud computing's greatest benefits will come from changes to the IT technology and organizational model. The exponential expansion of technology leads to smart and smarter devices, an explosion of business services, and increased complexity for IT operations professionals. So far, IT operations has responded by adopting virtualization, increasing headcount, and automating some management processes — but this strategy is rapidly approaching its "sell by" date. In the next five years, IT operations must evolve from the present early industrial model to one similar to mass production. Cloud computing, like mass production, is based on economy of scale and automation. It has shown extensive productivity gains and appears to be the direction needed for IT operations to absorb future production requirements.