As one of the hottest concepts in IT today, ‘cloud
computing’ proposes to transform the way IT is consumed and
managed, with promises of improved cost efficiencies, accelerated
innovation, faster time-to-market, and the ability to scale
applications on demand. While the market is abundant with hype and
confusion, the underlying potential is real—and is beginning
to be realized.
In particular, SaaS applications and public cloud platforms have
already gained traction with small and startup businesses. These
offerings enable companies to gain fast, easy, low-cost access to
systems that would otherwise cost them millions of dollars to
build. At the same time, cloud computing has drawn the cautious but
serious interest of larger enterprises in search of its benefits of
efficiency and flexibility.
However, as companies begin to implement cloud solutions, the
reality of the cloud itself comes to bear. Most cloud computing
services are accessed over the Internet, and thus fundamentally
rely on an inherently unpredictable and insecure medium. In order
for companies to realize the potential of cloud computing, they
will need to overcome the performance, reliability, and scalability
challenges the Internet presents.
Understanding The Cloud
Simply defined, cloud computing refers to computational resources
(‘computing’) made accessible as scalable, on-demand
services over a network (the ‘cloud’). And yet, cloud
computing is far from simple. It embraces a confluence of
concepts—virtualization, service-orientation, elasticity,
multi-tenancy, and pay-as-you-go—manifesting as a broad range
of cloud services, technologies, and approaches in today’s
marketplace.
To facilitate our discussion of this diverse marketplace, we first
lay out a framework that gives structure to the different offerings
in the cloud computing space. We will also explore the role of
public and private clouds in the marketplace.
The Cloud Computing Framework
Our cloud computing framework has five key components. The first,
virtualization technology, can be thought of as an underpinning of
cloud computing. By abstracting software from its underlying
hardware, virtualization lays the foundation for enabling pooled,
shareable, just-in-time infrastructure. On top of this technology
base, cloud computing’s principal offerings can be
categorized into three main groups: Infrastructure-as-a-Service,
Platform-as-a-Service, and Software-as-a-Service. Cloud
optimization is the final, critical piece of the
framework—encompassing the solutions that enable cloud
computing to scale and to deliver the levels of performance and
reliability required for it to become part of a business’s
core infrastructure.
We will now look at each of these framework components in more
detail.
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