Cloud Computing

Cloud computing allows companies to access IT-based services, including infrastructure, applications, platforms and business processes, via the Internet. Cloud technologies allow IT to better respond to the changing needs of the business, create new services and open new markets, thereby helping to achieve high performance. Although the term “cloud computing” was coined relatively recently, many elements of the concept, such as timesharing and virtual machines, have been around for several decades.

What makes cloud computing a growing reality for today’s businesses is the pervasiveness of the Internet and Internet technologies, combined with advances in virtualization, hardware commoditization, standardization, and open source software. A key catalyst is the success of major Internet companies such as Google, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft. The highly global and scalable infrastructure these companies use to power Internet search, electronic commerce, social networks, and other online services is an important enabler for cloud computing. In parallel, a distinctive group of highly capable business solutions firms have emerged, including proven providers such as Salesforce.com and Workday. Across all these offerings, cloud services tend to share several characteristics:

• Little or no requirements for capital investment to enable usage
• Variable prices based on consumption; buyers “pay per use”
• Rapid acquisition and deployment
• Lower ongoing operating costs than  IT owned and managed in-house
• Programmable and adaptable in use

Cloud computing is part of growth strategy. It could materially change how we develop applications and apply technology to business, especially when it comes to cost structure, investment and agility. Cloud computing is not just an external service, it is also internal. aimed at evolving a hybrid model and developing  owned internal cloud computing capabilities.

Going “public” or “private”

Within these overall parameters, clouds can take two forms: private within a company’s data center and are designed to provision and distribute virtual application, infrastructure and communications services for internal business users. These service components are designed to use the available IT assets in a highly efficient way. In contrast, public clouds extend the data center’s capabilities by enabling the provision of IT services from third-party providers over a network. For example, software-as-a-service and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), all of which offer virtualized solutions based on a variable, pay-as-yougo pricing model, are emerging as important elements of next generation IT service capabilities.

The choice between private and public clouds represents a trade-off between security and flexibility. A company using a private cloud gains the perceived benefits of lower risk and higher data security, since it owns and holds the cloud data and services within its own infrastructure, an approach that is sometimes required by regulators. A public cloud is seen as involving higher risk, since the user’s data is held externally alongside that of other businesses, but it also tends to offer greater flexibility and scalability than a private cloud.