Hello Cloud Computing

Cloud Computing! That's the new buzz word of the season.. the new kid on the block. What is all the fuss about? Here is my take:

Why?
Q: Do most organizations build their own power generators or water treatment facilities? The answer is NO
Q: So why should every IT Organization need to acquire and maintain all the IT infrastructure resources it uses?
Q: Should the organization rather not be concentrating on doing what they do best.. their core business.. instead of diverting resources expanding IT operations?
A: Cloud Computing, where standardized IT services are subscribed from different vendors.

A good example of similar services are utility companies.. say for instance the electric company. They provide to 'subscribers' a standard voltage and frequency. They so this very efficiently, and you don't have to bother about electricity generation any more. We get electricity 'as a service'.

Cloud Computing promises to do the same.. So for IT departments, it means no enterprise hardware hardware costs, no software licenses or upgrades to manage, no new employees or consultants to hire, no facilities to lease, no capital costs of any kind — and no hidden costs. Just a metered, 'pay per use' rate or subscription fee. Everything can be off load 'as a service'

Are we there yet?
Yes, Google documents is a very good example, and so are popular applications like Picasa web and Flickr. Imagine having a lot of commonly used desktop applications 'rented' from vendors.. enterprise email, word processing, document management, storage management, CRM, development platforms, testing platforms.. almost everything under the sun.

Most IT vendors like Google, IBM, Dell, Sun, HP have models ready for implementation. Amazon is ready with a commercial offering the EC2 and S3. Salesforce has already been offering CRM in the form of PaaS for quite some time.

Some associated terms:
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
Platform as a Service (PaaS)
Software as a Service (SaaS)

The Internet is more than ready to handle the heavy load clouds bring on, as essentially the cloud is on the Internet. End uses access resources over the Internet.

So the next step, or rather the first step to reach there, is by offloading computing infrastructure itself. Hiring computing resources, enterprise storage, virtualization is the way to go.

Sun goes on to say.. Use the Cloud, Build the Cloud, Be the Cloud. But there are some who are opposing the Cloud, like Richard Stallman here. According to him, used data should always be under his own control.

So lets wait and watch if the Cloud is welcomed or if it goes puff!

Image courtesy : How stuff works