{"id":1217,"date":"2012-06-25T03:55:58","date_gmt":"2012-06-25T11:55:58","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=1217"},"modified":"2012-06-25T04:02:19","modified_gmt":"2012-06-25T12:02:19","slug":"disruptive-forces-the-economy-and-the-cloud","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/?p=1217","title":{"rendered":"Disruptive Forces: The Economy and the Cloud"},"content":{"rendered":"

New generations of digital infrastructure\u00a0get deployed\u00a0quickly even when they are incompatible with what already exists.\u00a0 But old infrastructure\u00a0is incredibly slow to disappear.\u00a0\u00a0 The complicated business and legal mechanisms embodied in computer systems are\u00a0risky and expensive<\/em>\u00a0to replace..\u00a0 But existing systems can't function without the infrastructure that was in place when they were built…\u00a0\u00a0Thus new\u00a0generations of infrastructure can be easily added, but old and even antique infrastructures survive alongside them to power the applications that have not yet been updated to employ new technologies.<\/p>\n

This persistence of infrastructure can be seen as a force\u00a0likely to slow changes in Identity Management, since it is a\u00a0key component of digital infrastructure.<\/p>\n

Yet global economic and technological trends lead in the opposite direction<\/em>. The current reality is one of economic contraction where enterprises and governments are under increasing pressure to produce more with less. Analysts and corporate planners don\u2019t see this contraction as being transient or likely to rebound quickly. They see it as a long-term trend in which organizations become leaner, better focused and more fit-to-purpose \u2013 competing in an economy where only fit-to-purpose entities survive.<\/p>\n

At the same time that these economic imperatives are shaking the enterprise and governments, the introduction of cloud computing enables many of the very efficiencies that are called for.<\/p>\n

Cloud computing combines a number of innovations. Some represent new ways of delivering and operating computing and communications power.\u00a0 But the innovations\u00a0go\u00a0far\u00a0beyond\u00a0higher density of silicon\u00a0or\u00a0new\u00a0efficiencies\u00a0in\u00a0cooling technologies…\u00a0\u00a0The cloud is\u00a0ushering in\u00a0a whole new division of labor within information technology.<\/p>\n

Accelerating the specialization of functions<\/strong><\/p>\n

The\u00a0transformational power of the cloud\u00a0stems above all else from\u00a0its ability to accelerate the specialization of functions\u00a0so they are provided\u00a0by those with the greatest expertise and lowest costs.<\/p>\n

I was making this “theoretical” point while addressing the TSCP conference <\/a>recently, which brings together\u00a0people from extremely\u00a0distributed industries such as aeronautics and defense.\u00a0 Looking out into the audience I\u00a0was suddenly struck by something that should\u00a0have been totally obvious to me.\u00a0 All the industries represented in that room, except for\u00a0information technology,\u00a0had an extensive division of labor across\u00a0a huge number of\u00a0parties.\u00a0\u00a0Companies like Boeing or Airbus don't manufacture the spokes on the wheels of their planes, so to speak.\u00a0 They develop specifications\u00a0and assemble completed products in cost effective ways that are manufactured and refined by a whole ecosystem.\u00a0 They\u00a0have massively distributed supply chains.\u00a0 Yet\u00a0our model in information technology has remained rather pre-industrial and there\u00a0are innumerable examples of\u00a0companies expending their own resources doing things they\u00a0aren't expert at, rather than employing a supply chain.\u00a0 And part of the reason\u00a0is because of\u00a0the\u00a0lack of an infrastructure\u00a0that supports this diversification.\u00a0 That infrastructure is just arriving now – in\u00a0the form of the cloud.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Redistributing processes to be most efficiently performed<\/strong><\/p>\n

So\u00a0 technologically\u00a0the cloud\u00a0is an infrastructure honed for multi-sourcing \u2013 refactoring processes and redistributing them to be most efficiently performed.<\/p>\n

The need to become leaner and more fit-to-purpose will drive continuous change.\u00a0 Organizations will attempt to take advantage of the emerging cloud ecology to substitute off-the-shelf commoditized systems offered as specialized services. When this is not possible they will construct their newly emerging systems in the cloud using other specialized ecosystem services as building blocks.<\/p>\n

Given the fact that the best building blocks for given purposes may well be hosted on different clouds, developers will expect to be able to reach across clouds to integrate with the services of their choice. Cloud platforms that don\u2019t offer this capability will die from synergy deficiency.<\/p>\n

Technological innovation will need to take place before services will be able to\u00a0work securely\u00a0in this kind of loosely coupled world \u2013 constituting a high-value version of what has been called the \u201cAPI Economy\u201d. The precept of the API economy is to expose all functionality as simple and easily understood services (e.g. based on REST) \u2013 and allow them to be consumed at a high level of granularity on a pay-as-you-go basis.<\/p>\n

In the organizational world, most of the data that will flow through these APIs will be private data. For enterprises and governments to participate in the API Economy they will require a system of access control in which many different applications run by different administrations in different clouds are able to reuse knowledge of identity and security policy to adequately protect the data they handle.\u00a0 They will also need shared governance.<\/p>\n

Specifically, it must be possible to reliably identify, authenticate, authorize and audit across a graph of services before reuse of specialized services becomes practicable and economical and the motor of cloud economics begins to hum.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What really explains the new cost-equation of the cloud? Refactoring processes and redistributing them to be most efficiently performed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":68,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[43,2,86,87],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1217"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/68"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1217"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1217\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1217"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1217"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.identityblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1217"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}