If someone had asked you 20 years ago to define IT infrastructure, chances are your definition would've been a simple one. Even 10 years ago, we generally defined IT infrastructure as hardware and software: data centers, network of PCs, software developed in-house, licensed software installed on our own systems, etc.
Today's world is different. It's likely that at least some of the software used in businesses today is purchased not with perpetual licenses with ongoing support fees but with annual subscriptions that provide immediate access to the latest versions as they are released. Some businesses take things a step further by purchasing software as a service (SaaS), a simple web browser sitting somewhere else, on someone else's server.
In the past, businesses could set up all their own data centers. Today, there are few large organizations that don't make use of cloud computing capacity in one form or other—be it as basic as using corporate Dropbox accounts or as advanced as buying both computing and storage capacity on an on-demand basis.
Everett Rogers's diffusion of innovations model says that new ideas and products pass through five phases:
- Innovators
- Early adopters
- Early majority
- Late majority
- Laggards
Late majority is when more than 50 percent of potential users have adopted the technology, the position we're at today with cloud computing, yet perceptions in a number of organizations lag a bit behind the reality. To a certain extent, this is understandable: There's a comfort and familiarity in old models, and many still recall high-profile examples of organizations getting things wrong during the middle phase.
Indeed, the new IT model might look oddly familiar to an IT director from the 1950s, when computing power was on a mainframe, accessed on a time-share basis by what were then called terminals and would today be called thin clients. We've almost come full circle.
Cloud computing and outsourced infrastructure are mature technologies, so the risk today is to not invest in an untested technology. The real risk today is in hanging onto outdated models while competitors take advantage of the flexibility and scalability of the new world of on-demand IT.
