| | JUNE 20188CIOReviewThe stampede to cloud is the number one trend in today's IT landscape. Why finance, buy, install, operate, maintain and protect your own IT infrastructure when you can rent everything? Security concerns about the cloud are passé. If it's good enough for the banks and the US government, it's good enough for the rest of us. When you add in the knowledge that a lot of companies never wanted to run so much technology anyway, it's clear that the shift to cloud is unstoppable.Several fast-developing technologies are accelerating this transition. In particular, `serverless' computing, containerization and more dynamic network services are coming together to replace yesterday's static, inflexible IT infrastructure with something much more responsive, agile and intelligent.No more servers?Serverless computing means just that you don't have servers anymore. A cloud provider runs all the infrastructure, servers and operating systems that you need. And whether it is software engineers piloting a new digital service, or a retail business gearing up for Cyber Monday, the cloud infrastructure will automatically provide the resources you need and shut them down when you're done. In the past, a retailer had to guess at how much capacity they would need to cope with peak sales periods and formally request it in advance. In the serverless model, an event triggers the request for resources, which are intelligently allocated, scaled up or down, machine to machine with no human intervention.It has always been tricky to predict the computing resources you might need and easy to end up with too much or too little. The costs of unmet customer demands are high: the US IRS website crashed on the day millions of people had to pay their taxes. And the on-demand rental model is very pure commercially. You never end up with more or less than you need.The idea of serverless computing also turns big data into something anyone can use. When the CEO asks for sales figures you haven't got, you can turn to a big data service running on serverless and be ready at a moment's notice, turning those requests around almost `on demand'. If the data is coming from multiple sources, perhaps partner systems, perhaps an Internet of Things (IoT) sensor or a drone, the service can coordinate it all via public APIs whether in the same cloud or an adjacent one. With serverless computing, as soon as you ask a question (even via a virtual assistant, Siri or Alexa-type interface), the underlying infrastructure will work together to collect and analyse the data and give you the answer 'automagically'. We don't need legions of data scientists after all. You could do all the above with regular cloud IT but with serverless you don't have to set it up and you don't need to remember to switch the lights off as you leave the room.KEY TECHNOLOGIES DRIVING THE STAMPEDE TO THE CLOUDBy Mark Bagley, VP, Innovation Scouting, BT
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