Cloud Computing Likened To Running A Restaurant

Richard Garsthagen, director of cloud business development for EMEA at Oracle, spoke at Internet World 2014 about how to exploit the cloud to grow your business.

Here are the highlights of what he said.

Everyone talks baout "putting something in the cloud like we're putting data somewhere else, but that's not what cloud computing is about. it's about shifting the nature of IT to be provided as a service.

Now users can choose where to consume their IT resources from. If I wanted to run a survey, for instance, I could go to my IT department and ask them. They'll probably come back and ask a billion questions: "how many people are you asking?" or "how many surveys will you need?"

It doesn't make sense to ask them to do it. I can just go to SurveyMonkey and get it set up in five minutes. Users want to consume IT, and if you don't provide it, they'll find it themselves through a third party.

Running cloud computing is like running a restaurant. The first thing you have to have in a restaurant is a menu, a list of things people can consume from you IT services, or things you can provide through public computing.

What we do at Oracle is have an all-you-can-eat buffet of services, so you can come and take as much as you like.

People are so used to going to their IT departments for hardware and servers, that they often still do it - and then do most of the work themselves.

We always ask our customers: "what do you want to make consumable in your organisation?"

That's where platform as a service (PaaS) comes in. Now whenever someone comes to me and ask me for a database, I can just give them the file and they've got a database. It's actually more like a virtual machine. 

At Internet World 2014, thousands of IT, technology and digital marketing professionals are discovering cutting-edge technology innovations and strategies to drive their organisation's success.