As businesses strive towards efficiency, reliance on technology has become more critical. To retain focus on its core competencies and to reduce cost, businesses recently tried out some models including outsourcing and offshoring. Along its way or as an extension to these models, external hosting services and ‘Software as a Service’ evolved. Cloud computing takes the best of both worlds and delivers ‘Software as a Service’ from an external hosting service provider.
What is cloud computing?
Cloud computing is a term that is still evolving and hence its definition varies widely. The word Cloud is a metaphor for the internet and computing stands for itself. The main challenge of defining Cloud computing is the perplexity involved in quantifying its unrealized potential. However, in its present state, Cloud computing can be generally divided into 3 main categories based on its implementation.
1. Public Cloud: This is the standard cloud computing model in which the service provider presents cloud application and resources within their infrastructure but outside the consumers firewall.
2. Private Cloud: Usually in this case, the service provider is part of the organization that it serves. The key here is that the organization can scale up or down its resources easily based on demand.
3. Hybrid Cloud: The scenario in which a company opts to utilize some of the resources from public cloud and some from private cloud due to unique business requirement is considered as a hybrid cloud.
Platforms of cloud computing
Some of the known and implemented platforms of Cloud computing are
1. Cloud Infrastructure and Storage Platform : This includes and is not limited by datacenter facilities like hardware, network components, cloud operating systems and unstructured storage.
2. Cloud Application Platform : This entails application platforms like name services, Identity and directory store, compute runtime, structured data store plus other advance support structure for online service delivery.
3. Cloud Software as a Service Platform : This comprises of software services preset for online consumption where users are abstracted from the underlying platform on which the service is rendered.
Present and future technology landscape
In the last couple of decades, hardware had advanced from multi-threading (within one single core), multi-processing (within one single machine), multi-Instance (within one Operating System) to multi OS (virtualization within one physical server). At the same time, software pushed towards data centric architecture to best utilize data and service oriented architecture for efficiently catering resources.
Cloud computing is the next wave that could potentially shift the way technologists model future hardware, software and services in light of users and usage.
Consumers and providers
The consumers of cloud computing can be broadly classified into individual user and enterprises.
1. Individual consumers: These are mostly nontechnical users who are confronted by day to day problems like unsafe limited data storage, content synchronization among multiple devices, online collaboration and messaging. Individual users mostly stick within the realm of free usage of cloud services delivered by companies that generate revenue through paid advertisements. Some of the providers are listed below.
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2. Enterprise Consumers: An enterprise faces a superset of challenges than an individual consumer in terms of messaging, storage and collaboration. It also has to deal with in-house applications as well as off-the-shelf applications that are used daily to conduct business.
What excites enterprises about cloud computing is the dream framework which offers unlimited technological resources on demand. This means that a business can choose what capability it would like to add within a short notice without investing on new infrastructure, support team or licenses. The service provider encapsulates all the complexity within their infrastructure and transparently delivers the final output as a service for a cost.
Detail research and testing needs to be done before committing to any service provider given the hassle of rolling back. Some of the things to watch out while mapping your business environment to the cloud include:
Issues related to security, location, privacy, ownership and responsible consumption of data.
SLA definitions, reliability of service and operation control over services provided.
Clear expectations from the provider and the realistic operational constraints of the provider.
Tools and response time offered by the provider for monitoring and issue resolution.
Track record of the service provider, future company road map and growth plans.
Compliance in terms of security, legality, reliability and manageability of data and services.
Consumer and provider’s Bill of rights outlining each other’s risk and responsibilities.
The level of maturity and services delivered by different providers varies significantly. The chart below is just a slice to taste what the market place looks like.
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Cloud Computing challenges and benefits for business
One of the biggest challenges would be identifying a company roadmap deciding what fits and what doesn’t fit in the cloud. Next phase would be in letting things go from a control based environment to a trust (SLA) based environment. Another big challenge would be security and privacy of data.
Initial benefits for a company would be the speed at which resources can be provisioned to consumers. A shift in employee productivity as well as their role should be expected (from a fixer to a strategist). The infrastructural cost due to datacenter space, energy, equipment, licenses and maintenance will slide down.
Recommendations
From an article in ‘Compute World’[*7*] - “IT shifts to the cloud, anecdote by anecdote”, we see that companies are already driving towards Cloud computing. ‘Info World’ [*8*]- is another source which quoted that many companies will move towards cloud computing in the next 2 years.
The existing pay-as-you-go model of most cloud services moves the expenses incurred from a capital cost line item to an operational cost line item on the balance sheet. I see this can be a huge incentive when viewed from a CTO or IT manager perspective.
In my point of view, Cloud Computing is not a replacement for IT department because knowledge based mission-critical custom-built in-house applications will still require dedicated resources. Off-the-shelf-applications hosted by its vendor are best suited for Cloud computing. If the right applications are chosen and correctly implemented, Cloud computing will be a magic bullet for enterprise wide standardization. The vision of unified enterprise portal and increased user productivity through extreme collaboration /synergy can be achieved via cloud computing.
Conclusion
The realization of value is almost immediate for most of the small and medium companies. Big companies that have heavily invested in IT infrastructure will face difficulty in getting the right mix. It is certain that Cloud computing is here to stay because businesses and technology companies have come to realize its immense potential.
References
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/cloud/default.aspx [*1*]
http://www.oracle.com/us/technologies/cloud/index.htm [*2*]
http://www.ibm.com/ibm/cloud/ [*3*]
http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/cloud.html [*4*]
http://aws.amazon.com/products/ [*5*]
http://www.salesforce.com/cloudcomputing/ [*6*]
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9191238/IT_shifts_to_the_cloud_anecdote_by_anecdote?source=toc [*7*]
http://www.infoworld.com/d/cloud-computing/many-companies-say-they-will-adopt-cloud-computing-within-two-years-812 [*8*]
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