It is becoming increasingly important for IT decision markers to make sure that enterprise architects are creating application delivery strategies that can be delivered across several different platforms as it is becoming clear that we are existing the long age of “this is what we have, so this is what we’ll always use” phase of infrastructure. With the robust arrival of cloud and cloud-driven mobile devices (which are another extension of the everything-as-a-service paradigm) being flexible no longer refers to scale, it increasingly refers to application delivery.
Today, CIO Magazine reminded us of the Gartner prediction that by 2012, up to 20 percent of companies will not own any of their own infrastructure since most IT leaders will have outsourced all of their needs to the cloud. If this is truly going to be the case, we can only imagine that the number of devices and platforms being used will continue to evolve and change, thus it is critical to architect for such evolution.
As the CIO of Proctor and Gamble noted, “No longer can we pick a hardware platform and expect to live with it exclusively, or even for very long. IT leaders must conceive a technology architecture flexible enough to deliver enterprise applications—sometimes the same single application—in several ways…this includes running apps in others’ data centers and in the palms of people’s hands.”