The article can be found on Forbes.com.

Lets take a step back, and think how the cloud and easy server provisioning is effecting the computing world? To put it in a nut shell, Joe Smith from Gibraltar can almost instantly deploy more computing power than Hewlett Packard. This is definitely revolutionary and deserves a big round of applause, but what we must realize is that the moment that Joe deployed his army of virtual servers, he has adopted a problem. An enterprise problem. Due to the fact that cloud computing, and server and stack provisioning, have become so easy, the time consuming and error-prone operations have moved higher up the scale; they’ve moved to the application. Joe is now faced with the challenge of providing services to his online and in cloud applications; updates, patches, hot fixes, log gathering, database manipulations, and the like. Pushing configuration changes to a couple of servers is no problem, but when these changes are on hundreds of servers, multiple tiers, and across clouds or data centers (don’t forget to add dependencies into the equation), we can quickly see how the celebration of easy cloud server provisioning is very much short-lived.

Application Service Automation is the natural evolution of the migration to cloud computing, and as the servers have become commodities, followed by the operating systems and stacks, businesses will now need to enforce scalable and manageable application services as part of their daily operations.

Ozzie said that the future for companies’ data hosting will be in a combination of cloud computing and on-premise data centers. In his words, “at some point in time, every major enterprise, every company, every ISV is going to have some blend of software that runs on-premises and some that runs in the cloud, and everyone wants tools that they can use to in essence deploy some apps to part of their organization that might be in the cloud…”

We couldn’t agree more. Our vision is that in the future, every company will have some kind of environment in the cloud. As Daniel Lyons of Newsweek recently said, “People are going to be putting their information not into some device but into some service that lives in the sky.” Lyon added, “Pretty much everyone in the tech industry agrees it’s the future.” For companies, cloud computing makes a lot of sense because it’s cheaper: in some cases, it cuts a company’s costs in half.

Of course, organizations that move to the cloud will need tools to help them deploy and manage their cloud applications.

The layer IT will need to handle in the future is the Application layer: deploying, managing, maintaining and troubleshooting applications in the cloud. Existing automation tools are old and fit traditional data centers. They are system- and infrastructure- centric solutions, while there should be a shift to application-centric solutions that will enable effective and efficient automation.

Nolio is a vendor leading the charge on doing just that. As an innovator of Application Service Automation solutions for physical, virtual and cloud data centers, Nolio’s Application Service Automation is a software platform for designing and executing automated application service workflows across the data center, enabling reliable, effective processes for the deployment of applications in the cloud and for the management of application change.