What is cloud computing?
Nicholas Carr certainly earn the enmity of even more tech veterans with his newest forecast: cloud computing will put most of the areas of corporate technology. “IT departments will not have much to do after the business computing shifts out of private data centers into the cloud, ‘” Carr writes in his new book, “The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google.”
Exaggeration? Absolutely. But with a grain of truth. Cloud computing, before a nebulous concept as the name suggests, is becoming a legitimate emerging technology and piquing the interest of looking CIOs. High energy costs, personnel and hardware, limited space in data centers and, above all, the desire to simplify their operations have encouraged many young companies – and a still small number of established companies – betting on the cloud.
The concept of cloud computing makes enormous sense to AndrĂ© Mendes, CIO of Special Olympics. “It helps the CIO to remove another layer of complexity of organization and concentrate on providing the highest levels of value.” Mendes, who is moving much of its data center outside the company via conventional hosting services, expects to move cloud coming years.
Why is this happening now? Enabling technologies, including nearly ubiquitous bandwidth and the increasing virtualization of servers, plus the lessons learned from the rapid rise of software as a service (SaaS), are encouraging CIOs to think outside the data center.
No doubt, cloud computing is still in its infancy. Concerns about security and latency applications exist and are unfounded. In addition, providers have not fully formulated their business models and price, one reason that some CIOs who did not reap the desired ROI from SaaS now look skeptically to cloud computing. Yet another issue: transparency. Trust data and mission critical applications to a third party means the customer has to know exactly how cloud providers deal with key issues of security and architecture. The question is the extent to which suppliers will be transparent to address these details.
A new level of scalability
Unlike many “next big things”, cloud computing is not ready sprouted from the brain of a young genius in Silicon Valley. “It’s the logical result of what happened in computing over the past 30 years. In a sense, is a return to the past, time-sharing is brought to the maximum, “says Mendes.
True, but it is easier to get analysts and IT insiders to talk about the features and goals of the cloud to get an exact definition. Keep in mind also that different vendors will have a different approach to cloud computing. The vision of the Salesforce.com SaaS was very similar to what you know today. IBM’s vision includes mashups of sets of massive customer data in real time. One difference with the now familiar model of software as a service in which many clients access the application from a supplier: the cloud computing environments also allow users to run their own applications on the infrastructure provider.
“The cloud is basically a combination of grid computing, which was basically raw processing power and software as a service,” says Dennis Byron, analyst at Research 2.0. “In reality, cloud is network virtualization.”
At the supplier level, the intention is to allow users to request more computing power during use. This is a key point. A major goal of cloud computing – is IBM’s Blue Cloud or EC2 (Elastic Cloud Computing) from Amazon – is rapid scalability. Or, a term more “modern” elastiticidade.
To Barney Pell, founder and CTO of Powerset, a startup that is creating a search mechanism in natural language, be “elastic” is to have the ability to stretch when needed and then shrink. Her company is committed to index a large portion of the Web and compute-intensive task that is performed most of the time. The peaks of work would exceed the normal computing capacity of the company.
Instead of buying more servers and infrastructure to meet peak demand, Powerset has become one of the first users of Amazon’s EC2 and S3, a storage service from Amazon also related. Powerset pay for resources as they use them, releasing significant funds for other purposes.
Pell suggests that IT executives who are considering cloud services carefully consider what features your data center uses all the time and which are only needed during peak demand. Moreover, the use of an elastic service gives IT time to establish a baseline, ie, the minimum level of resources needed to operate the business all the time.
Likewise, groups or departments within companies often have to deal with a specific project, but do not have money or do not want to buy the necessary infrastructure. Another situation where cloud computing can work well.