Development in the Cloud – Challenges Remain, but the Future is Bright: Part 1

There was a time when any mention of “the cloud” was met with skepticism by IT executives. Few knew what it even meant, and of those who did, few expected that it would go from buzzword status to actually having a major impact on their IT organizations. Yet here we are, many years later, and the cloud has gone from a mere catchphrase to being a very real force on the IT landscape.  And it’s moved beyond IT as well – Apple’s introduction of its iCloud consumer service for managing users’ music and apps signals that the cloud has officially gone mainstream.  For nearshore developers it has gone from being a somewhat vague concept to a new paradigm that is quickly emerging as a standard in how nearshore development is performed.  So what is different?  What changed everyone’s minds?  Certainly the first cloud offerings from Google, Amazon, Salesforce.com and Microsoft were influential. They were the first to take the “vaporware” out of the cloud and provide companies with real, tangible tools that enable them to experience its benefits firsthand.

In almost every way, the cloud has begun to offer the benefits promised during those moments when it was first teased, making many IT executives anxious to fully tap it’s potential as a business technology investment. Now, rather than spending countless IT dollars to build and deploy vast infrastructures to support new web and mobile applications, companies have a cheap and easy alternative for hosting them. This has been a boon for nearshore developers, who were previously beholden to enterprise infrastructures to get their applications up and running.

But like many new and evolving technologies, challenges to cloud adoption and use as a nearshore development platform remain.  Many client executives, wary of cost issues in the event of unforeseen problems, and shaken by the potential for unreliability of cloud technologies (as was recently witnessed with Amazon’s outage), have been reticent to move their infrastructures to the cloud. And though cloud advocates – many of them nearshore providers who’ve seen firsthand the benefits of the cloud for development – have made enormous strides in education about cloud security, many are still unwilling to take the plunge.

The promise of the cloud is real. Despite executives’ initial reluctance to adopt it, cloud computing should be looked at seriously by companies in their nearshore development efforts. Here are a few reasons why it will change the way providers develop applications throughout 2011 and beyond.

Speed + Cost Savings = The IT Holy Grail

Without a doubt, the chief benefit for companies leveraging the cloud for application development in nearshore engagements is speed. The hosted infrastructure the cloud offers – in a cheap, “pay-as-you-go” model, no less – means a much faster setup process for the development team, to say nothing of the flexibility it offers in the development process itself. Previously, teams were required to conduct extensive preparations before initiating a nearshore development project, all of which was contingent on ensuring that the infrastructure in place was capable of supporting the applications to be developed.

The cloud eliminates many of the infrastructure concerns of the development team by providing a hosted model, offering as much storage, computational power and services as are necessary to build and deploy the application while streamlining the setup phase and overall development process. This provides a significant cost benefit to the client as well, as IT managers are freed from the need to invest significant resources in additional servers or other costly infrastructure before even considering the application in question. It’s all there in the cloud, it’s cheap, and it’s ready as soon as the development team needs it.

So, instead of focusing on setup and infrastructure, development teams can focus their resources on the application itself, and aligning it with the business needs of the client organization. With cloud development, nearshore teams can focus on delivering nothing but value to the business through their development efforts, a key tenet of Lean application development and one that can position the IT organization as a valuable contributor to the business.

In the second part of this post, I’ll discuss how clients and nearshore providers can clear reliability and security hurdles and look to the future of cloud use in nearshore development