Global Services Blog

It means exactly what is says, technology offered and served as a service.

Yes, yes, pay for the technology we use, when we need it and to use only the technologies that we need.

It seems a simple and convenient concept, but it is something that entails a great revolution in the current IT service delivery and the IT world.

What is behind all of this?

Let's go back to the beginning so we can understand this future better. I promise not to take too long…

For those of us who have been around a while and who saw more or less the birth of Information Technology (allow me to use this definition), we have seen many changes and advancements over the years.

Without delving too much into the past, it was around the seventies when International Business Machines (IBM) started to commercialise its 360 systems. These were a set of systems called a mainframe which is a technology which allows you to connect to a large electronic brain through terminals to obtain the information held there.These systems had a very fast processing speed for the time and let us access the information almost immediately which was unthinkable at the time.

Another important milestone would take place in the eighties and also thanks largely to this company named IBM with the development of its Personal Computers (IBM PC).After a short while the advance in personal computer technology would develop the world of local networks and the use of a technology called Client-server, where the information was not longer stored on the server but it was also shared by the client or workstation.It was also unthinkable at the time that our PC could process, deliver and formulate information on its own.

More recently, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, everything would become centred on a new concept:the internet,the network of networks and on developing web technologies, where information is no longer stored on a physical server of a local network but rather it has gone to a "sky" which is always connected and which lets us access it from any point on the network with only a browser and access to this network.

Now a new series of developed concepts are appearing from virtualization to cloud computing. These technologies want to change the technological world established by the era of the internet and transport us to a new revolution called "as a Service". The information here floats on a cloud independently from where it is located and it can be used however needed and like a service.

But what is cloud computing?Cloud computing is nothing more than a use and delivery of resources and services from the web model. A model where everything directs the "delivery" like "as a Service", where it does not matter where the resources are located nor who provides them,but rather that they are always available, they are cheap,flexible,scalable,safe… and above all, they give me access to the information I need at any given time and from any device without needing extensive knowledge about computers.

What changes does this model entail compared to the traditional model or the one that came just before it?

I would say that it basically changes the four models:

• Purchase model:purchasing assets and creating architectures, versus purchasing services with pre-established architectures.
• Business model:pay for fixed assets and administrative resources, against paying for the use we make of the technology
• Access model:go from access through the corporate network and our desktop, against access via the internet and any device.
• Technical model:Platforms which are rigid in terms of ownership, with maintenance and management costs, dependant on manufacturers and not used to 100% of their capacity, against multi-technological elastic platforms, self-managed and always made to fit the precise need in each moment.

To summarise briefly, it would be like being able to convert all the fixed costs from before to variable costs and pay per use.

This will allow us to improve our cash flow, reduce costs, help us to grow, reduce the time to market and externalise technological management. This will allow us to focus solely on the necessary use of technology which applies to our business.

It would seem that we are on an irreversible road towards this world of distributed and customised computing…