The cloud has been changing the very face of computer technology and it’s largely been innovated by the newcomers with the old, faithful behemoths of the industry moving slowly but inexorably in their wake. In an article published at Bloomberg Buisnessweek, “The Cloud: Battle of the Tech Titans”, Ashlee Vance has taken a principled view of the current cloud-computing and -storage landscape and the competing schools of thought that are shaping the future. The difference seems to split between the expectations of the might of the public cloud vs. the private cloud and in-house virtualization; an ideological split that puts Amazon, Google, and Microsoft across the fence from traditional infrastructure like EMC, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Oracle.

The real meat of Ashlee Vance’s article of epic proportions happens to conclude in a very succinct paragraph—and I hope you’ll forgive me for jumping to the end of the book,

Silicon Valley veterans have long figured that once technology gets good enough, the world’s computing infrastructure will come to resemble the electricity infrastructure—which is exactly what’s happening. In his 2008 book The Big Switch, author Nicholas Carr documented how companies that once ran their own power generators eventually bought electricity from a select group of large providers because it was easier and cheaper to do so. The large providers then built enormous generators, aggregated demand, and invested more in fine-tuning their systems. Companies had to adjust to relinquishing control of part of their infrastructure, but once they did they were able to focus on getting better at whatever it was they made. Everybody won.

In the digital version of this shift, the role of utilities is played by the megadata centers. The cloudpeople are saying this technological wave, too, will make everyone a winner. Corporate technology has a chance to shift from a painful, dark art to something that injects new life into businesses. The only losers will be those companies that sit still and suffer grim outcomes at the hands of smaller companies that embrace the cloud.

Unlike electricity, computing and storage actually have a great deal of benefits for both tapping into vast cloud-vendors and for keeping cloud-like data center behaviors as a sort of “dark cloud.” The danger here, though, is due to the presence of “the cloud” as a buzz word we have to keep an eye out for marketing sleight-of-hand now better known as cloudwashing. Enterprise that wants to take advantage of these technologies may want to look at what the technology will do for them more so than what it’s called in the outset. Especially because we’re still defining the cloud anyway.

The Public Cloud: Our little piece of epic infrastructure

The public cloud rose out of taking the initiative when it comes to looking at how having a world-spanning Internet allows companies to virtualize themselves out of the local box. Services like Amazon’s Web Services bring affordable supercomputing and mass storage to start ups and industry traditional corporations alike by spreading out the burden amid numerous data centers, marching across the globe. And all the signs point to Amazon as actually having game—and by that I mean game changing.

However, the big infrastructure giants note that not all big data and large population information problems can be solved properly with a public cloud. For example, there are some security problems inherent in reaching out through networks into a 3^rd party and it leaves your business stretched thin across infrastructure it doesn’t control and at the mercy of the strange whims of another corporation.

The Private Cloud: Oracle, EMC, IBM, and the other giants

Oracle and EMC have responded to this by making it obvious that people can join the best of both worlds into the moniker of “hybrid” systems that join the public cloud with private data centers. And much of the IT industry and enterprise players are looking into it for the possibility of lowering costs and increasing availability. This has been explored as the fact that cloud-storage isn’t really that big of a threat to traditional storage. As the cloud concept is really more or less a mechanism for making a swath of separated, distinct data and computing sources look like the same one to a client.

We will probably see a lot of smaller ventures take to the public cloud without blinking. It allows start-ups to offset the huge costs of requiring a giant data-center to someone who is basically leasing data-center time. Medium sized companies that use big data will probably continue to take a private data-center to store their core important business-logic in order to maintain their overall agility and rent excess storage and computing power from the cloud as they need it.

We’ve seen this happening with a lot of the real juggernauts who are weighted down by their growth into juggernauts. Companies like Oracle and Hewlett-Packard have a lot of holdings that they invested in hugely, data-centers, infrastructure, networks, computing centers, et cetera. They’d be outright foolish to let those rot just because of the public cloud and they have no reason to embrace the cloud for a great deal of the functions that their data centers currently provide.

What the cloud does do for them—in the same way it does it for start ups—is generate the ability for them to “pop into existence” a virtual data center for them to test expectations of new products or see how their business might make use of new technologies. They can also do so without having to re-task their current resources, they can get it running with very little overhead, watch it happen, and when they’re done there’s very little clean up needed.

Conclusion: The cloud covers both Olympus and the foothills

The capabilities of the cloud crosses a gamut of structural necessities and it’s so nimble that it can be used for small things as well as it’s useful for big things. We’ve seen both open and public clouds, we’ve seen dark and private clouds, and we’ve seen how it’s been embraced even by the traditional storage industry.

While cloud-computing and -storage continues to ascend Olympus between these relative newcomers like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, bringing with them the fog in the foothills—it intertwines with the already-present giants who live at the pinnacle who have built themselves technological empires that still work well.

It will be slow for them to move from their castles, and they will certainly find a way to use this new technology, but it’s unlikely to unseat them—nor does it need to in order to let the data flow.

It may be a thick read, but I wholeheartedly urge you to pore over Vance’s article, which contains a lot of historical evidence, quotes, and activity by these companies. If for no other reason, than to see where the cloud is now and how we might expect to see it make our lives better in the future.