Posted by NaviSite Quarterly
Imagine a scenario where you buy costly servers and other IT hardware, and then spend too much of your precious time and money managing, upgrading, and running them. Is it worth the hassle, especially today when you would like to focus on surviving the slowdown rather than worrying about the operational hiccups of your IT environment? Cloud computing has unlocked a new generation of IT that promises agility within your business without stretching your IT spend. The current economic crisis is the right environment for this new revolution to grow in.
Today is the time to do more with less, and get the flexibility to scale your IT to meet your needs. Cloud computing is a solution that lets you do this swiftly and cost-effectively. This saves you from needing to raise huge amounts of capital to build and operate your own data center, which might be a tough proposition in this challenging market. What’s more, you save money, reach global audiences, gain web-scale efficiencies, and get more time on hand to focus on solving your critical business issues, while your IT environment continues to meet growing business demands.
The “What” of Cloud
The question “what is cloud computing” leaves many confused. As with any new technology buzzword, there are multiple definitions for cloud computing circling the IT world. Some call it “evolved hosting,” some “virtualized environment,” and still others refer to it as “platform as a service, infrastructure as a service, or software as a service.” Surprisingly, all of them are true!
Cloud computing is an emerging on-demand development, deployment, and delivery model that delivers off-site IT components, including infrastructure, applications, and services over the net on a pay per use basis. The key features of cloud computing worth noting are:
- It is on-demand, which means the resources are provisioned or de-provisioned quickly using technologies such as virtualization.
- It is off-site, which means you do not own the IT resources; they belong to the provider and you use them when needed. It also means lower costs, since you do not require any software or hardware.
- It is “pay per use” model, which means that you pay for what you need, saving costs on unnecessary hardware software purchases.
- It is over the net, which means that the computing infrastructure or applications and their associated data reside on a central web-based server rather than on an end user’s desktop (including servers, network, and storage). This gives users the mobility to access the information that they need any time, anywhere, from any device with an Internet connection—including mobile and handheld phones.
The “Where” of Cloud
The cloud can be deployed anywhere across the computing stack, and can expand or contract based on business needs. The cloud computing landscape of organizations can be a mix of various clouds, including:
- Cloud Infrastructure or “Hardware-as-a-Service”: It includes providing shared/reusable hardware computing hardware – such as servers, storage network, and managed services for a specific time and usage-based fee. Virtualization, grid computing, and para-virtualization are all examples of Cloud Infrastructure.
- Cloud Application or “Software-as-a-Service”: It involves offering specialized software that is installed, run, and maintained on a Cloud Infrastructure somewhere and can be accessed by the end users over the net. You pay based on number of application users or seats.
- Cloud Platform: This refers to a unified platform that dynamically provisions, configures, reconfigures, de-provisions, and manages hardware and software as needed.
- Cloud Service: This is independent software that can be used in conjunction with other services to achieve an interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over the network.
- Cloud Desktop: This includes desktop applications that run from the cloud hardware via the Internet.
- Cloud Storage: In this type of cloud, the data is separated from the place where it is processed, and stored remotely.
The “Why” of Cloud
No matter which cloud you find yourself on, its silver lining is common across, which is why more and more businesses are transitioning to the cloud. One of its key advantages is that it is a cost-effective way for businesses to acquire and use IT – a proposition that is magnified in the economic crisis. This makes it a valuable solution for small and medium businesses that need to maximize productivity without spending too much on IT resources or hardware, and now even for large enterprises who are striving to stay afloat in the downturn.
Another compelling reason to consider cloud computing is that it adds responsiveness and flexibility to your business and is ideal for businesses that experience frequent spikes in usage. The on-demand model lets you re-size or right-size your IT environment and eliminates the need for planning computing demand in advance, which further saves the surprises or costs inherent in computer capacity planning.
The Cloud entails no upfront capital costs and low operational costs. What’s more, it helps enterprises to seek and deploy new technology innovations without worrying about procuring and managing resources to enable it – so that they can compete better in the market. You do not need to build in-house expertise for IT components and technologies, as your cloud computing provider deals with all this and more. Remote access, effective resource utilization, portability, real-time collaboration capabilities, and speed to market are some of the other propositions driving the shift to cloud, especially when information has become more and more on-demand and mobile.
The Future of the Cloud
Cloud is here to stay and will continue to expand. Gartner estimates that by 2012, one in every three dollars spent on enterprise software will be a service subscription rather than a product license, and that early adopters will purchase as much as 40 percent of their hardware infrastructure as a service rather than as equipment. In another 2008 survey, IDC predicted that spending on IT cloud services will reach US$42 billion by 2012, which makes it 23% of total IT spending in 2012. While strategic business processes like finance will take longer to reach the cloud, non-critical business services and applications accessed outside the firewall like information or entertainment-oriented services such as video on demand are fast moving to the cloud.
The real foundation for cloud computing is not just Internet, it is trust. Technology providers need to build the trust that the servers, applications, and business information of their customers are secure. The provider who understands specific business needs as well as various technologies and delivery models can help you leverage cloud in the best possible way and achieve maximum business value from IT spend.
So, if you need scalable, affordable, and flexible IT infrastructure, then Cloud is the way to go. And if you choose a provider who is able to align it well with enterprise IT management, security, governance, and visibility, then you are ready to accomplish more and succeed in the Cloud.
NaviSite is a leading technology provider with extensive experience in cloud computing. Their dynamic cloud computing platform, AppStructure, which combines Virtualization, SOA, and Web 2.0 across infrastructure, application, and service layers, can help organizations build clouds and manage them, adding agility and cost-effectiveness within businesses. With deep knowledge of both enterprise and cloud data centers as well as vast capabilities across all layers of the Cloud stack, including infrastructure, applications, operating systems, databases, platform, and virtualization, NaviSite can help design creative, hybrid delivery solutions that leverage the best of both worlds.
If you have any questions or need more information about NaviSite’s cloud computing solutions, then contact the author of this article at content@navisite.com.
