Does it mean that enterprises will succeed if they abandon traditional IT and adopt cloud services instead? The answer should be: Of course not. That’s just the initial goal of cloud computing.
Now, let’s put aside the competition between traditional IT and cloud services. If we have entered the era of cloud computing as the leading role, both individuals and enterprises are now widely using the services provided by various public cloud providers. From infrastructure, to platforms, to applications, we can provide all kinds of cloud services. If so, what will cloud suppliers compete for and how will this market develop?
There is no doubt that the ultimate service and technology determine life and death, and the most critical one is technology. Why do we say that? Perhaps the first thing most people think of is data security. Here’s another example.
If cloud storage services are billed based on traffic and capacity, one cloud service provider may need 2GB of actual physical space, while another cloud service provider may only need 500MB for storage needs of consumers with the same capacity.
One cloud service provider can automatically and continuously protect various data changes in the enterprise LAN, while another cloud service provider needs the enterprise to maintain data changes by itself.
A cloud service provider can deploy and manage storage resources in a more granular manner globally, while another cloud service provider can only face the smallest granularity of files.
One cloud service provider can provide different technical solutions for long-term data storage and recent online data storage that are transparent to users but conform to the law of data lifecycle value, while another provider uses the same solution to manage data years ago
Obviously, in this way, the service prices and profit margins that the two can afford are very different, and even directly lead to the survival of their services. These naturally need more sophisticated and advanced technologies as support, and the constantly updated good technology is the internal power for enterprises to survive and develop.
Therefore, we believe that in a long period of time, although at the business level, cloud computing and traditional IT providers will continue to promote their respective goals in their respective perspectives. However, in terms of technology, the two have the trend of going in opposite directions and gradually merging. Perhaps in the future, technology will tend to be unified and open, and services will be divided into enterprise level and open source camps.
On the other hand, although cloud service providers need to go through the process of understanding the industry and formulating promotion strategies during their business expansion, the biggest difference between “cloud” and traditional enterprise IT in the future may be that the former will be driven by technology, while the latter will always be driven by business.
In short, there are many differences between cloud services and traditional IT, but they are not completely exclusive. In some aspects, the two are related.
