Selling the Cloud Sublime - To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World - page 100

newsletters and websites and made it into the business press, including
such inluential publications as Forbes , which ran a compilation of upbeat
market forecasts that included the Gartner study (Columbus 2012b).
According to another report, cloud computing has penetrated every facet
of the global corporate supply chain. As a result, it concludes, Gartner's
forecast that the IaaS cloud will grow by 42 percent by 2016 should not
be shocking (SmartData Collective 2013).
The inal example of a private research organization that is helping to
create a promotional discourse around the cloud is McKinsey & Company,
which describes itself as “the trusted advisor to the world's leading busi-
nesses, governments, and institutions” (McKinsey & Company 2013).
Founded in 1926, the company boasts that it works with two-thirds of
Fortune magazine's top 1,000 corporations. McKinsey's relationship to
cloud computing began with some controversy when in 2009 it deied
the early boosters and argued that, especially for large companies, mov-
ing to the cloud was not necessarily the best choice. Its report “Clearing
the Air on Cloud Computing” concluded that the service was overhyped,
particularly as a cost-saver, because cloud services like Amazon Web
Services charged more than it would cost companies to keep their data
processing in house by using their own data centers and servers. Ideally,
McKinsey recommended keeping it all in house but virtualizing the
servers or, in essence, carving up servers into multiple virtual machines,
enabling software to maximize power from one machine and adding the
ability to scale according to the company's changing needs. Even these
recommendations were qualiied, as McKinsey recognized that small and
medium-sized irms would not be able to enjoy the same scale economies
for in-house systems as their larger counterparts (Rao 2009). This early
research continues to resonate, as the report of one independent study
concluded: “Large enterprises with highly optimized IT shops tailored
to their business' needs may ind cloud computing to be more expensive.
But, if a company has workloads that ebb and low in their use of com-
pute power, then the cloud can yield substantial savings” (Butler 2013a).
The suggestion that large irms should shun the cloud was met with
consternation and criticism from cloud-computing supporters. Most were
dismayed that such a reputable research irm would rush to judgment and
charged that the report “neglects to address a few key trends that are occur-
ring in cloud server services. Innovation is rapidly changing in the cloud.