Shifting Cloud Patterns

Best Practices

Thursday, 29 July 2010 08:09

Written by Rakesh Dogra

The cloud is promising to get thicker, more nebulous, and more complex. More and more companies are hitching their wagon to the cloud in an attempt to cut costs and increase operational efficiency. The cloud (or cloud computing) is being held up as the latest trend in IT power.

Traditionally speaking, cloud computing encompasses anything to do with hosted services and their delivery over the Internet. Generally, these services are delivered via PaaS, SaaS, and IaaS. A cloud service also differs from traditional hosting because the former is elastic, sold only on demand, and handled almost entirely by the provider. A cloud can be private or public. A closely related term is virtualization, which is a method by which physical computing resources can be turned into multiple virtual or logical resources. Business drivers such as technology growth, resource crunch, virtualization, the explosive exponential growth of the Internet, shrinking IT budgets, and the need for flexibility (to name just a few) are driving more and more companies to consider cloud-computing options. Even a couple of years ago, Gartner predicted that cloud computing would be no less influential than e-business.

Software vendors are dealing with diverse arenas in search of a bigger slice of the industry pie. A vendor today must consider several crucial questions before pitching for business.

Although it is a widely accepted fact today that cloud computing is the way of the future, the approach a vendor should take in the cloud-computing market is sometimes uncertain. Even within cloud computing, some observers say that there is more money-making potential in the hosting and service-provider areas.

All the trends mentioned above play a huge role in creating different opportunities for those who are in the business of selling IT services and those that use them. The number of companies wanting to use the cloud for added business advantage is rising phenomenally, meaning that the impact on IT vendors will be of mammoth proportions.

Another interesting trend is the fact that a greater number of big companies are establishing their own private clouds. A private (or, alternatively, internal or corporate) cloud allows a corporate body to have greater control over its data and resources. A company can also choose a private cloud, which can be fully hosted by an outside party like Amazon’s EC2 or S3 or, alternatively, can be an in-house data center managed by the company’s IT department. A case in point is IBM’s Blue Cloud program, which was launched a couple of years ago. The company has since constructed 13 data centers. Large enterprises can also “sell off” excess capacity, much like a cloud computing vendor.

Another shift in this industry has been a growing association between cloud providers and service providers. SaaS vendors are looking at strategic partnerships with professional service providers to “tie in” a customer completely. Consider, for instance, the case of Salesforce.com. Its Successforce services enable a customer to make contact with either its partners like Deloitte and Accenture or with its in-house consultants.  

Another facet of the cloud-computing market today is the availability of a wide array of cloud offerings. It is not enough for a company to merely offer a virtualized data center along with some operational tools and call it a cloud offering. As Reuven Cohen, CEO of Enomaly, states, most virtualization vendors have “rebranded” their products as cloud products. This sentiment is echoed in the words of Andy Jassy, senior vice president of AWS (Amazon Web Services), who says that by limiting their services to a mere rebottling of old technologies under a cloud label, service providers have “deprived organizations with private cloud systems from all the benefits of going into the cloud.”

Big names like IBM and Microsoft, along with companies like StrataScale, have released cloud offerings like WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance, Windows Azure cloud platform, and Automated Managed Hosting, respectively.

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