Digital and technology

Innovation in the cloud

Innovation in the cloud

Cloud computing has been developing rapidly over the last five years. Emma Blee speaks to Dr Terry Harmer about what the future holds for cloud computing.

While innovation in cloud computing continues to develop, a culture and attitude change could be just as important as the technological developments.

Dr Harmer from Belfast e-Science at Queen’s University says that “many of the technologies in cloud are not new” but that the way they are used can be different.

He explains that cloud computing requires a different approach to building applications that focuses on the requirements of an infrastructure rather than the features of a particular infrastructure.

In years to come, Harmer sees further development and innovation in the allocation of resources for application needs. He also predicts that there will be independent management of infrastructure where applications grow and contract to reflect demand. Harmer says that down the line applications will become self-healing and fraud tolerant.

Security is a major area for innovation, he adds, but because the legislative process is slow it can be difficult to govern cloud computing.

According to Harmer, SMEs are likely to benefit the most from cloud computing as there will be significantly lower IT set-up costs. Companies will be able to pay as they go for IT infrastructure, rather than investing in expensive servers.

“Companies can be created quickly and at low costs. New businesses can now start up with basically no computer infrastructure cost. SMEs can operate infrastructures on a scale that were previously only available to governments or large-scale companies and can operate globally without significant cost,” he says.

When asked if innovation in cloud computing within the US is developing quicker than the UK, Harmer explained that the scale of uptake is higher but the market is also larger.

“The UK is surprisingly well-placed to take advantage of cloud technology. There is a good pool of talent available from a number of research and development programmes initiated by government,” he comments.

Uptake of cloud technologies is depends highly on the way people think about IT. Harmer states: “Ultimately [uptake] will depend on companies, government department and educational organisational attitudes. The technology base is available if organisations are open to change. Cloud is as much an organisational transformation as it is a technology transformation.”

The academic says that the US economy is prepared to “embrace new ideas more readily than the UK”.

In the UK “many organisations cannot cope with the notion of not having a machine room with racks of servers that belong to the company. This is jokingly called ‘server-hugging’ but it is very real,” says Harmer.

However, with the current “economic calamity”, he predicts that “greater openness to new ideas may mean cloud adoption is hastened”.

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