ABSTRACT

Transition is an inseparable factor and force of the expanding IT landscape. Once in a while, transformational and trendsetting technologies erupt and energize IT service organizations, product vendors, and consultants to provide technology-sponsored business simpližcation, augmentation, and optimization solutions. Cloud technology is not an exception to this predominant and perpetual trend. Enterprises are in the thick of actions with the largesse of improvements, improvisations, and innovations being supplied and sustained by the indomitable spirit of the cloud paradigm. ­e elegant and exciting history of IT goes back to the era of monolithic and centralized mainframes. ­ey were followed by client-server (CS) programming and multitier distributed computing, which are dominating the IT scene these days. Tiered and layered approaches are making it easier for designers, architects, and developers to build a bank of business services and applications and, hence, they are still in the limelight. Simplicity and sensitivity are the gist and crux of these paradigms. In short, as IT has been dri£ing toward distribution and decentralization methods, the much-maligned centralization has come to the forefront again with the unprecedented adoption of cloud concepts and ultrahigh broadband communication technologies. Enterprise IT is bound to leverage scores of consolidated, virtualized, and shared servers. ­is centralization concept simpližes centralized monitoring, management, and maintenance. It is noteworthy that this tectonic shi£ is being enunciated and edižed by the lively cloud concept. In a nutshell, one can think of IT as a pendulum that swings between two extremes, centralization and distribution. As the Internet is being utilized as the most a¡ordable, pervasive, and open communication

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infrastructure, the long-abandoned and -aborted centralization technique is springing back to long and glorious life.