There is a noise going about that cloud computing can cut costs, speed implementations, and scale quickly. However, the noise may be slightly off-the mark – particularly in product pitches!
What is Cloud Computing
Search.com provides the following definition of Cloud Computing:
The term cloud is used as a metaphor for the Internet, based on the cloud drawing used to depict the Internet in computer network diagrams as an abstraction of the underlying infrastructure it represents. Martin Banks, Associate Analyst at Bloor Research for Data Centres, told me, "I prefer the term Exostructure – an externally sourced (and theoretically limitless) seamless extension of an internal IT systems infrastructure that delivers information services on a fee-paying basis. This is looking at the issue from the users' point of view."
Cloud Computing Service Categories
Infrastructure-as-a-Service
Infrastructure-as-a-Service, like Amazon Web Services, provides virtual server instances with unique IP addresses and blocks of storage on demand. Customers use the provider's application program interface to start, stop, access and configure their virtual servers and storage.
Platform-as-a-Service
Platform-as-a-Service in the cloud is defined as a set of software and product development tools hosted on the provider's infrastructure. Developers create applications on the provider's platform over the Internet. PaaS providers may use APIs, website portals or gateway software installed on the customer's computer. Force.com, (an outgrowth of Salesforce.com) and GoogleApps are examples of PaaS. Developers need to know that currently, there are not standards for interoperability or data portability in the cloud.
Software-as-a-Service
In the Software-as-a-Service cloud model, the vendor supplies the hardware infrastructure, the software product and interacts with the user through a front-end portal. SaaS is a very broad market. Services can be anything from Web-based email to inventory control and database processing. Because the service provider hosts both the application and the data, the end user is free to use the service from anywhere.
A cloud service has three distinct characteristics that differentiate it from traditional hosting.
- It is sold on demand, typically by the minute or the hour;
- A user can have as much or as little of a service as they want at any given time; and
- The service is fully managed by the provider (the consumer needs nothing but a personal computer and Internet access).
What Cloud Computing Means to Business
Well, rather than running computer applications on an in-house computer, you run them on an external machine, which could be anywhere in the world, and access the application programs via the internet. It also means that the data associated with the application is held externally to your organisation. So the application is hosted on a server with the associated data being stored in a database – all on a server run by a third party.
There is just one more piece that we need to understand and that is that a cloud service can be either public or private. What does this mean? A public cloud sells services to anyone on the Internet. Amazon Web Services is the largest public cloud provider at the time of writing. A private cloud is a proprietary network or a data centre that supplies hosted services to a limited number of people. Just one more term that you need to understand and that is virtual private cloud; this is when a service provider uses public cloud resources to create their private cloud.
What makes cloud computing so appealing at the moment? In a recent article [1], Nigel Stanley, Bloor Research's Security Practice Leader, said the following, "In an economic downturn cloud computing oozes sexiness. The thoughts of off loading your data to a third party gets financial types excited as they start to see how much money can be saved." Cloud computing means that rather than purchasing software, which would go on your CAPEX, you pay for it when you use it so it comes off your OPEX budget instead. Banks feels that, in fact, cloud computing will also reduce your OPEX spend as well as the implementation costs and associated consultancy costs will be less as well. On one point that Banks made I am not sure that I would agree with in that he felt the integration cost would also be smaller; I am not so sure and would advocate budgeting the same as an in-house implementation.
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