Separation of concern (SOC) has been a leading approach while designing systems and process. Briefly put, SOC helps us in identifying a number of tasks (separating) to be addressed in order to accomplish a major work( such as building a software system or highway) and handling each one of those tasks (concerns) separately and integrating them into one final working model. For instance, Service oriented architecture views the whole software development process in terms of services to be built – each service performing one or more task.
Building an ITeS offering involves two major concerns: procuring infrastructure (hardware) and building service(s) on that. Rapid developments in technologies and changing customer demands pose a constant struggle for IT Managers to balance IT infrastructure investments with issues such as ROI. Traditionally separate departments such as IMS used to take care of this issue.
The limiting effect of addressing two concerns at the same time can be better understood by following examples.
- Whenever Indian Railway plans to introduces its services to a new territory, its has to do it in 2 stages. 1. First, build railway lines (infrastructure) and (2) commence new trains (service).
- However, in case of Airport Authority of India, the focus is just to build air traffic facilities ( air port etc) and leave it to service providers such as AI or King fisher to offer services
Advent Cloud computing changes it all. Cloud computing promises to take away the concern of procuring, building and maintaining infrastructure from IT managers and releases their energies and help them focus their efforts on developing services on them.
