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Consultancy
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The twin challenges of driving the high costs of information technology down while providing innovative new solutions to improve the business are two forces that often come into direct opposition in the modern IT shop. Businesses must keep costs down to stay competitive while at the same time investing in new ideas that will offer compelling new products and services to those same customers.
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Cloud computing significantly changes many aspects of enterprise computing acquisition, operations, and governance, usually though not always for the better.
These aspects are:
Reduced capital expenditures - Upfront costs are dramatically reduced since the onus of initial computing infrastructure investments rests primarily on the cloud computing provider. Ongoing costs are also lower due to economies of scale and multi-tenancy, which allows access to the lower cost of cloud computing resources even for very infrequent tasks.
Low barrier to entry - Because hardware and software does not have to be acquired, installed, provisioned for every need and resources can be tapped on-demand, often in real-time, cloud computing can be as easy as moving existing applications into a hosted data center, although this depends entirely on the architectural model of the cloud computing provider.
Multitenancy - Multiple customers share many of the same resources in the cloud computing model. This sharing both distributes cost and enables economies of scale in terms of centralization of resources including real estate, bandwidth, and power. Multitenancy is one of the key enablers of efficiency while at the same time posing certain security issues.
Security - In theory, cloud computing can be more secure than do-it-yourself computing since shared costs allow larger overall investment in security processes and infrastructure. However, there remain worries about access and control over an organization’s sensitive data, though to-date the security record of cloud computing has been quite good.
Scalability and performance - Cloud computing can provide access to very high levels of scale without enormous costs of traditional infrastructure. Resources don’t have to kept on hand for peaks that then remain dormant much of the time and their costs stranded during valleys. Performance of cloud computing can also be very good since many providers have data centers around the world to keep the processing reasonably close to those accessing it over the network. However the distances between the business and the services in the cloud are usually greater than from a local data center. The resulting latency can frequently be a bit larger than with local resources though often quite acceptable for many applications.
Centralization vs. federation - Cloud computing can be centralized such as Amazon and Salesforce or it can be highly distributed using such peer-to-peer capabilities as provided by BitTorrent or Arjuna. Both methods provide access to economies of scale but as Tim O’Reilly observed this week, building on federated computing computing resources often makes more sense than building on a centralized model, despite the former’s rather nascent state at the moment.
Service-oriented - Cloud computing is a service delivered over the network, but true service-orientation allows such services to be componentized, pluggable, composable, and loosely coupled. OpenID is a good example of such a service that has a well-defined interface and for which there are many providers in the cloud which are essentially interchangeable. Cloud computing has become increasingly service-oriented, with Amazon probably being the farthest along in maturity and breadth of services. In the end, cloud computing is making the Web truly become a Global SOA.
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