10 years ago, hosted mail solutions like Gmail, or Yahoo mail were treated like toys. Businesses, small and big, had to host their own mail servers. And in addition to the core business, there were people in IT, or some engineers who were willing to multi-task, had to look after the mail server. Including running the mail server, maintaining DNS MX records, configuring the mail server, maintaining the hardware etc. Such was the "do it all ourselves" era of computing.
Today, not many organizations host their own mail servers. Specially those small to medium businesses. You rather buy the service from a service provider, and all that the organization has to do is to create/delete/update mail accounts. All the burden of running the mail service has been handed over to the service providers. Such is the "service" era of computing.
Though cloud is deemed to be a "hype" thing, it really is not. It is there already and people use it for real business. We have been using the "cloud" model for Web hosting for more than a decade. More and more apps are "out there" rather than in-house. Such is the "cloud" nature of computing today.
Almost everyone, except may be the poorest in the world, has a bank account. We own the money, but the responsibility of keeping the money is "outsourced" to the bank. It gives us peace of mind, rather than having sacks of cash notes under our bed. The idea of cloud computing is similar. You own it, but it is managed and kept by someone else. If you are not using it, someone else can use it, and you do not have to pay. And you save, like earning interest on the money deposited in the bank. And you do not have the burden of acquiring hardware, maintaining software and the like.
So we are moving to a centralized model back again? Yes, sort of. Is that not risky? Well, is that not risky to have everyone's money in a single bank? We have established our "trust" with banking systems. Similarly we would learn to trust cloud providers.
To start with, we had the software as a service model. Then we saw Amazon offering hardware, computing power, as a service with EC2. We also have middleware as a service being offered, for e.g. by WSO2.
So, hardware, middleware and software are all available as services with the cloud model.
So your ESB will be on the cloud, and you will mediate your SOA messaging though that. You will have your business process modelling tools on the cloud. You will have your identity provider on the cloud. It will soon become like your email. Your middleware and your enterprise apps will run out there on the cloud. You will not have to have room for a server room anymore.
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