There is a lot of hullabaloo over cloud computing. Exactly what is cloud computing?
Cloud computing is a term used to describe the use of computing resources that are not owned by the user nor housed at the user’s facility; rather, the computing resources are out there “in the cloud.” It does not matter where the infrastructure is located or who owns it – the user (the customer) is only concerned with buying the functions it needs. Thus, the user – typically a large company – uses computing resources owned by another party located at the owner’s facility or facilities. The facilities may be thousands of miles away from the user. The benefits to the user of cloud computing is that the user need not make a substantial investment in hardware and software, nor a substantial investment in IT personnel; the user can just pay for the resources and support it needs. In addition, cloud computing resources are theoretically “infinitely scaleable”, meaning that the resources can expand and grow (or shrink too) on demand as the needs of the customer grow (or shrink) without any investment by the customer or any build time in computing infrastructure.
This pay-for-use model has actually been around in the computing world for at least two decades. In its earliest form, it was called timesharing. At that time, users would lease time on a large mainframe computer, and have remote terminals at the users’ locations. Yes, operations were slower and more bulky at that time, but that was the state of the art. Then came what was called grid computing, which was usually based on flat fee pricing per computer user (actually per central processing unit – CPU) per hour and often a separate charge for storage using remote infrastructure in several data centers. In many senses grid computing was cloud computing in infancy. Cloud computing has matured.
Similar to grid computing, cloud computing is priced on a subscription basis, and customers need not invest in purchasing any hardware and software or pay for data centers. That is all taken care of by the cloud vendors. The cloud computing vendors serve up the needed resources as required by the users. Major vendors in cloud computing are Amazon with its EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) platform, Google and its Google Apps services, Salesforce.com (principally sales support services), and Sun Microsystems under Sun’s Cloud Computing division.
In theory, the recession is going to drive a lot of companies to use cloud computing. There can definitely be huge savings in cost if a company can avoid investing in the large systems required for large enterprises, but that depends on pricing in the cloud. One aspect of cloud computing of concern to users is how the vendors are supporting all of the cloud computing resources they are delivering and whether the service levels will remain high. Concerns about security do not seem to be that prevalent today as most users and vendors have gotten comfortable with existing security measures, recognizing that they are not perfect. Furthermore, the legal ramifications to security breaches, though embarrassing and modestly costly, are not so draconian as to drive companies to build and secure their own computing resources. In fact, the cloud vendors are quite comparatively well capitalized and can make the needed ongoing investments in security to appeal to customers.
The specialization of cloud computing has also driven down the cost of computer resource usage for customers. Vendors can focus on their data and computing infrastructure and invest in services that customers value, and customers can avoid going into the real estate and IT management business just to run their own businesses. Thus, the specialization that cloud computing offers should contribute to greater efficiencies in both use and provisioning of the cloud resources.
