Cloud49: Alaska is in the cloud.

• Author: Bohi, Heidi
• Position: TECHNOLOGY

As cloud computing stands poised to become more dominant than the desktop in the next decade, with industry projections indicating that worldwide revenues from these public IT services may grow from $16 billion in 2009 to $56 billion in 2014, it is no surprise Nathaniel Gates is on cloud nine as he enters his second year as president and founder of his company Cloud49.

"The entire IT industry understands it's going to cloud computing," Gates says. "Some say it's five years away, some say it's last year, but nobody debates it's going to happen."

Although the industry phenomena is just starting to catch on in Alaska, the rest of the world is already enabling this model for on-demand network access to a shared pool of computing resources, including networks, servers, storage, applications and services. Gates and other technology experts predict by about 2014 most people will access software applications online and share and access information through the use of remote server networks, rather than depending on tools and information housed on individual personal computers, making it the dominant mechanism for IT infrastructure and application delivery.

PHASING OUT INFRASTRUCTURE

"In just a few years, the thought of purchasing infrastructure will be passe," Gates says.

Although he didn't know it at the time, as the former IT executive for some of Alaska's largest businesses, Gates has been implementing cloud computing fundamentals for several years. After a six-year stint as IT manager at Arctic Slope Regional Corp. (ASRC), in 2006 he became director of technology for Chenega Corp., which at the time was quickly becoming a showcase example of how Alaska Native corporations could profit from contracts through the 8(a) program.

The problem, though, was the corporation did not have the infrastructure to keep up with the growing pains that came with increasing its revenues from $50 million to $800 million in only five years. At the same time, he says, it had 30 new business subsidiaries, many with their own IT group.

"Infrastructure is often an afterthought in business development. 'Let's get the business, then deal with the problems of having too much business later,' seems to be the thinking," he says.

Hired to consolidate the 8(a) subsidiaries separate IT groups and systems into a single unit, Gates says that connecting remote locations to a centralized data center using Internet technologies such as multi protocol label switching (MPLS) to...