How will the cloud influence IT architecture? I suspect Legal restrictions on data will force some adopters to operate in a mix of local and cloud infrastructure. Certainly it will force EMEA adopters to position customer data into the cloud making sure its not held in the US. The nature of eggs in one basket culture will likely drive adopters to use clouds from multiple vendors which mill make management and security dynamics change.
From a networking angle I can see large organisations with multiple internal segments and multiple clouds, the old days of green, amber and red network zones look to be heading west. I always try to architect circles of trust, and I love thinking of Robert de Niro in ‘meet the fockers’ with this analogy – in each circle you trust the people and the devices at a consistent level of control. In the case of the cloud its almost a case of designing with no trust of either the people or the device so identity management, hardening, encryption and data partitioning become much more important than say a firewall rule (close them all I say).
The nature of the cloud resilience and performance construct drives application servers to be stateless and server provisioning needs to be agile. Virtualisation has probably started this ball rolling but it needs to be at full speed for the cloud. This is commercially great news (and not bad for the greenies either) but I wonder how much effort it will take to drive out old thinking on n tier applications to ensure each layer has the right balance of agility to achieve the required business service resilience and performance.
More to follow including how this influences security, resilience, provisioning and monitoring.