Future of IT, Essay Example

No other industry has driven global trade as much as IT which has become synonymous with off-shore outsourcing. Even though global trade in physical goods far exceeds IT but IT has been the main enabler of this explosive growth of global trade in the last two decades. The next biggest revolution in IT has already started and it is “cloud computing”. Cloud computing is expected to not only support the majority of commercial enterprises IT processes in the next ten to fifteen years but will also come to redefine consumer computing.

According to Pew Research, majority of the technology experts in the fourth Future of The Internet survey expect that most people will access their software applications and share and access information through the use of remote server networks by 2020 (Anderson and Rainie, 11 June, 2010). If these expectations materialize, it points towards a bleak future of hard drives. Just last month, the City of New York inked a historic deal with Microsoft that will give city officials access to Microsoft’s cloud computing features among other things. Cloud computing offers central advantages over traditional desktop and server computing such as centralized data centers that could be access from anywhere and significantly faster data processing speeds because it reduces computers to merely data input equipments that do not have to run software applications and process data anymore.

US government is the largest consumer of IT products in the world and it threw its full might behind cloud computing last year by signing a deal with Google that requires Google to offer cloud computing services to various government agencies such as Nasa. It is argued that modern computers and commercial servers are already near the speed limits that is possible within the constraints of traditional computing structure and any major future breakthrough will now occur by significantly redefining desktop computers and commercial servers. It seems the answer has already arrived in the form of cloud computing and it has been gaining traction lot faster than what earliest proponents of cloud computing could have visualized.

Work Cited

Anderson, Janna Quitney and Lee Rainie. Pew Research Center Publications. 11 June 2010. 29 November 2010 <http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1623/future-cloud-computing-technology-experts>.