Technological inflection point

We're at a technological inflection point, a major branch of computing is splitting off and everyone from the sysadmin to the CEO is wondering what it will mean.

How technology really evolves

This is how technology really evolves. Many people believe in orthogenetic evolution, a singular march from hunched over ape to intelligent man. Nevertheless a better conceptualization of the high-level concept is that of a branching tree. Some portion of an existing family heads off in a new direction and all the families continue changing, yet in different directions.

Computing is the same way. There are many, many companies operating mainframes, in spite of the perception that it was killed off by client-server architectures. Love your flash memory? Somewhere someone is spinning tape-based electronic storage. And they do it for good reason. Mainframes are quick, proven, secure and reliable. They've been optimized for mission-critical applications just as payroll. Tape-based storage is cheap as dirt and may be used for compliance with archiving regulations.

Now cloud computing offers another option for IT architects to put in their arsenal. It's great for applications with uncertain processing loads, for rapidly ramping infrastructure and for startups who want to pay as they go. Nevertheless if you have to worry about PCI and HIPPA compliance, you're not taking your data outside your firewalls. Got applications with specific hardware requirements, like powerful processors to handle graphics? You may not even want to virtualize, let alone go to the cloud.