Cloud computing: from hype to reality
For companies and suppliers in the value chains of IT and telecommunications, cloud computing has reached a level of maturity, generating enormous value. Jan Michiel Berkel, director of DCspine expects this trend to continue: ‘Organizations can make a difference with using the public cloud. Especially now with the impact of the coronavirus on businesses, the trend is accelerating rapidly. People are now experiencing what good cloud solutions can offer compared to on-premise solutions; how quickly things can go live and be applied on a large scale with the use of the cloud'.
Uncertainty about costs was one of the major barriers to parties opting for cloud computing, Berkel explains. But that has now changed. Of course, the costs are still an important factor, but at the same time people are realizing that the most important value of the cloud can be found in other areas. And these are much more important than the costs. Think of how new applications are being rolled out from scratch on a large scale. Now that employees have to work from home, we see how quickly organizations use teamwork applications such as Microsoft Teams, Zoom, et cetera, and deploy them company-wide'.
Added value
‘The cloud offers the possibility to work remotely and from any location, with easy access to application and computing resources’, DCspine’s director continues. ‘This is vitally important in the current crisis'. But according to Berkel, the added value of the cloud also lies in its ability to quickly apply new, innovative applications and technologies: 'The fact that many organizations have switched to Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS, ed.) has led, among other things, to having enormous amounts of data in the cloud. Data about customers, for example. If you assume that data is the new gold, then you want to use it as quickly, easily and cost-effectively as possible. For example, by deploying advanced data analytics and AI applications, in order to make decisions for your business or product strategy and respond more quickly to current developments. Without the availability of such applications in the cloud, this would be difficult, time consuming and very expensive, because that kind of software requires an enormous amount of computing power, which used to only be available to the biggest organizations.’
Open Networking
According to Berkel, ‘open networking’ is another trend that will break through in 2020. The chief technology officer at DCspine, Arjan Kunstman, explains that this development is getting more and more traction within a broad group of organizations in the coming year. Kunstman: 'Basically, you talk about disconnecting the network hardware, such as switches and routers, and the associated operating systems. Organizations get more freedom of choice and are less dependent on one manufacturer of network hardware. It also ensures that organizations are able to choose the operating system that best suits their specific network requirements. At DCspine we are users of Open Networking ourselves, where we opted for an operating system that is optimized for our high demands in the field of interconnectivity and virtual networking. In addition, due to the open source character of various network operating systems, new functionality becomes available faster. Open Networking is a trend that will show itself more and more this year and has already been very beneficial to organizations.