The Cloud: Moving From Agile Infrastructure to Agile Innovation
It wasn't that long ago that the major allure of cloud computing was agility, efficiency and cost reduction. All good things, to be sure. And most of us are glad that it is here (unless perhaps you are a hardware provider or reseller). Who amongst us misses the extended capital budget cycles, the hardware vendor selection process, or the guess work of identifying future capacity requirements over the life of new hardware?
So for the vast majority of us, the business value of the cloud is now a given, and all of your competitors have probably already figured this out as well. Sure, there are companies still voicing security concerns, but most realize that security is less about where your systems are housed and more about how they are configured and monitored. And good luck proving that the cloud doesn't facilitate, enhance, or support sound security practices. So the cloud it is, at least for the majority of us. So what's next?
At best, innovation for most companies (unless R&D was a dedicated division) has historically moved at the same or slower pace as did other technology related projects. The arduous process of hardware and software acquisition became barriers to innovation, and solid business cases and hard requirements affected our ability to truly innovate. It was often difficult to dive into the innovative solutions of the day when you had to wrestle with acquisition and implementation constraints. Storage constraints and the cost of implementing enterprise SANs kept many projects on the back-burner if they involved significant data volumes. Due to the commitment of significant capital, fear of failure was real. It was hard to go back to the well for another investment if your prior project didn't deliver real results.
Cloud computing has now put innovation at our fingertips. Do you still need to know what you are doing? Of course. One could argue you can now make mistakes much more quickly than before. But that is a good thing. In fact it is a great thing. No more fear of wasting capital budget funds. Fail fast. Learn. Tweak. Iterate. Better stated, you need to know what you are doing in order to provide real business benefit, but you now have the luxury over extending your learning and mastery over time.
If you choose to not innovate, you will need to come up with better excuses than the old tried and true ones. Much of the complexity is now abstracted. The heavy lifting is bundled in, and what's left is to figure out how innovation will help differentiate your business from your peers. If you aren't able to leverage at least one of these (machine learning, big data, natural language processing, or IoT) to provide real business advantage, maybe you aren't thinking outside of the box.
If innovation isn't a constant on your annual project list, perhaps it should be. Techniques such as machine learning is no longer constrained to the Fortune 500 with ample budgets and deep technical staff, and the same applies to all innovative services that major cloud providers continue to rollout at a steady pace.
Whether you choose innovation as a service, or take advantage of prepared machine images with "known to be good" software stacks, the time to innovate is now. The only thing holding you back is yourself.