What Is Cloud Computing Exactly?
It’s a good question. As I’ve suggested in an earlier posting, Cloud Computing can be regarded as a marketing term, since everyone and his country cousin claims to be providing some kind of cloud offering nowadays. Consequently there are a rapidly increasing number and variety of Internet based services that companies might want to take advantage of.
So the more interesting question is “what are the problems of adopting cloud-based services?” This question was the theme of a recent briefing I had with Brain Boruff of CSC. CSC is putting a great deal of emphasis on cloud computing right now, presumably because it wishes to sell its expertise in this area – and because everyone and his country cousin in the IT user space is interested in Cloud Computing.
I personally expect the large consultancies to do healthy business in this area, partly because most organizations have not formulated any kind of approach to this yet and partly because there are no real cloud standards yet – although there inevitably will be at some point.
The diagram below depicts CSC’s “view of the cloud.” While it’s not so different from other depictions I’ve come across, it has the virtue of naming the “issues” that you need to think about. So let me describe the diagram.
First of all it breaks up the cloud possibilities up into four:
- Infrastructure as a Service: Think of this as equipment rental with the equipment being in someone else’s data center and you being able to manage it at a “provisioning” level.
- Platform as a Service: This is really an extension of the web hosting situation where you normally get the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) nicely set up for you to add a web site to. Of course even in that environment that are many other components that come as part of the ‘platform” including email and content management systems such as Drupal, Joomla and Wordpress. There’s no reason not to extend this idea and provide well populated platforms that are development and deployment environments (like Bungee for example) or Business Intelligence platforms or transaction processing environments or whatever. So now there are many such offerings.
- Software as a Service: This is the Salesforce.com situation where you rent the application or set of applications.
- Business Process as a Service: This covers situations where the service isn’t simply IT based and may involve actual people doing actual things on your behalf – as well as software. Internet banking is, for example, a business process as a service. It’s already possible to get fairly sophisticated HR services in this way and software development, of course.