Cloud Computing ( Providers, Benefits and its Challenges)

The write up will be focused on the first three categories

1.    Application and Information clouds – Sometimes referred to as Software-as-a-Service, this type of cloud is referring to a business-level service. Typically available over the public Internet, these clouds are information-based.

2.    Development clouds – Sometimes referred to as Platform-as-a-Service, cloud development platforms enable application authoring and provide runtime environments without hardware investment

3.    Infrastructure clouds – Also referred to as Infrastructure-as-a-Service, this type of cloud enables IT infrastructure to be deployed and used via remote access and made available on an elastic basis.

Major SAAS vendors

Who’s using Clouds today?

Ø   Startups & Small businesses Can use clouds for everything

• SaaS, IaaS, collaboration services, online presence

Ø  Mid-Size Enterprises

• Can use clouds for many things

• Compute cycles for R&D projects, online collaboration, partner integration, social networking, new business tools

Ø  Large Enterprises

• More likely to have hybrid models where they keep some things in house

• On premises data for legal and risk management reasons

 

Cloud Computing Benefits

Cloud computing is enabling the enterprise to:

·         Expand scalability – By utilizing cloud computing, IT staff can quickly meet changing user loads without having to engineer for peak loads.

·         Lower infrastructure costs – With external clouds, customers do not own the infrastructure. This enables enterprises to eliminate capital expenditures and consume resources as a service, paying only for what they use. Clouds enable IT departments to save on application implementation, maintenance and security costs, while benefiting from the economies of scale a cloud can offer compared to even a large company network.

·         Increase utilization – By sharing computing power between multiple clients, cloud computing can increase utilization rates, further reducing IT infrastructure costs.

·         Improve end-user productivity – With cloud computing, users can access systems, regardless of their location or what device they are using (e.g., PCs, laptops, etc.).

·         Improve reliability – Cloud computing can cost-effectively provide multiple redundant sites, facilitating business continuity and disaster recovery scenarios.

·         Increase security – Due to centralization of data and increased security-focused resources from cloud computing providers, cloud computing can enhance data security. Cloud computing can also relieve an IT organization from routine tasks, including backup and recovery. External cloud service providers typically have more infrastructure to handle data security than the average small to midsize business.

·         Gain access to more sophisticated applications – External clouds can offer CRM and other advanced tools that were previously out of reach for many businesses with smaller IT budgets.

·         Downsize the IT department – By moving applications out to a cloud, IT departments can reduce the number of application administrators needed for deployment, maintenance and updates. It departments can then reassign key IT personnel to more strategic tasks.

·         Save energy – Going “green” is a key focus for many enterprises. Clouds help IT organizations reduce power, cooling and space usage to help the enterprise create environmentally responsible datacenters.

Challenges of Existing Cloud Computing Solutions

Like any new trend or technology, we must address some challenges that cloud computing poses before we can recognize its full value. These include:

·         A lack of interoperability – The absence of standardization across cloud computing platforms creates unnecessary complexity and results in high switching costs. Each compute cloud vendor has a different application model, many of which are proprietary, vertically integrated stacks that limit platform choice. Customers don’t want to be locked into a single provider and are often reluctant to relinquish control of their mission-critical applications to hosting service providers.

·         Application Compatibility – Most of the existing public compute clouds are not interoperable with existing applications and they limit the addressable market to those willing to write new applications from scratch.

·         Difficulty in meeting compliance regulations – Regulatory compliance requirements may limit the use of the shared infrastructure and utility model of external cloud computing for some environments. Achieving compliance often requires complete transparency of the underlying IT infrastructure that supports business-critical applications, while cloud computing by design places IT infrastructure into a ‘black box’ accessible only through well-defined interfaces. As a result, internal compute clouds may be a better solution for some applications that must meet stringent compliance requirements.

Inadequate security – By design, cloud vendors typically support multi-tenancy compute environments. IT managers must look for a balance between the security of an internal, dedicated infrastructure versus the improved economics of a shared cloud environment.