The Cloud has been the next big thing for some time.
Globally the Cloud has entered the ‘adolescent’ phase as an innovation. In San Francisco Bay Area and other tech hubs in India, the Cloud is now entering the mainstream as a concept.
Microsoft adverts ‘To the Cloud’ are telling consumer the Cloud is ready. Google and Gmail has made the cloud easy. And I would guess from previous form an alarming amount of business data worldwide is stored in Hotmail and Gmail related cloud portals by executives with passwords like [petname6]. Mostly spreadsheet dumps from large enterprise data, from my prior experience…
Yesterday I attended the Microsoft Partner Connect Roadshow on the Cloud for developers as an analyst. Analysts and developers are the canary in the coalmine for business adoption of the Cloud. When analysts / developers feel this is ‘business ready’, that’s when users get their first ‘formal’ cloud apps.
So today, the enterprise data store which is ’SQL Server’ in the Microsoft world is now available and ready in the Cloud in a secure data centre. It’s called Azure SQL. And is exciting as you can choose to get rid of the internal SQL server and all those maintenance tasks. In theory you can recycle all your SQL and code as well. I say in theory because developers know that is rarely so simple.
Like web hosting, it is a pay per month contract model, so the Cloud on Azure for business has limited barriers to entry.
I was impressed, as I’d rather my data in a Microsoft data center than a decentralised data center. It’s a rare case where centralism can work, but data centers may be that case. There are 22 data centers, none in Australia, but a cache in Sydney.
I was impressed by the Azure cloud innovation potential.
Connect on twitter @christopherhire
Disclosure: The author was a guest of Microsoft and has worked for companies in the MS Partner Program since 2003. The innovation analysis / terms used in this article derive from his innovation analysis work for 2thinknow.