The Promise of the Cloud

Most users of cloud computing services offered by some of the large-scale data centers are least bothered about the complexities of the underlying systems or their functioning. More so given the heterogeneity of either the systems or the software running on them. They were most impressed by the simplicity, uniformity, and ease of use of the Cloud Computing Service abstractions. In small and medium enterprises, cloud computing usage for all additional cyclical IT needs has yielded substantial and significant economic savings. Many such success stories have been documented and discussed on the Internet. This economics and the associated trade-offs, of leveraging the cloud computing services, now popularly called “cloudonomics,” for satisfying enterprise’s seasonal IT loads has become a topic of deep interest amongst IT managers and technology architects.

The promise of the cloud both on the business front (the attractive cloudonomics) and the technology front widely aided the CxOs to spawn out several non-mission critical IT needs from the ambit of their captive traditional data centers to the appropriate cloud service. Invariably, these IT needs had some common features: They were typically Web-oriented; they represented seasonal IT demands; they were amenable to parallel batch processing; they were non-mission critical and therefore did not have high security demands. They included scientific applications too. Several small and medium business enterprises, however, leveraged the cloud much beyond the cautious user. Many startups opened their IT departments exclusively using cloud services—very successfully and with high ROI. Having observed these successes, several large enterprises have started successfully running pilots for leveraging the cloud. Many large enterprises run SAP to manage their operations. SAP itself is experimenting with running its suite of products: SAP Business One as well as SAP Netweaver on Amazon cloud offerings. Gartner, Forrester, and other industry research analysts predict that a substantially significant percentage of the top enterprises in the world would have migrated a majority of their IT needs to the cloud offerings by 2012, thereby demonstrating the widespread impact and benefits from cloud computing. Indeed the promise of the cloud has been significant in its impact.

Source of Information : Wiley - Cloud Computing Principles and Paradigms 2011