A Cloud is a Cloud………or is it?
In this blog I’m going to try and define, why people are struggling to define cloud computing!
Cloud computing per se is not a new technology or product. The National Institute of Standards defines it thus:-
“Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.”
Then they go on to say
“Cloud computing is still an evolving paradigm. Its definitions, use cases, underlying technologies, issues, risks, and benefits will be refined in a spirited debate by the public and private sectors. These definitions, attributes, and characteristics will evolve and change over time.”
So stay awake!
My version attempts to simplify this by asking some simple questions i.e.
Who is the Application Owner?
Who is the Data Owner?
Who is the Hardware Owner?
The answers to those questions or requirements will determine whether there is a need for access to a Public, Private, Hybrid or a Community Cloud. In the future its envisaged that organisations may need the use of all four different variants in the future and as our friends at NIST stated, its subject to evolving change. The enabling factors in all cases is the emergence of virtualisation as a tool and fast broadband anywhere from anything. Are you reading this BT?
The easiest to explain is the public cloud. This variant will dominate because of the ‘normalisation’ of messaging and collaboration through the use of Google, Facebook, eBay, online banking etc etc. and the equalisation of functionality between a home user and an ‘at work’ user ( sometimes the same person!). Gartner reckons that 20% of the worlds messaging will be in the public cloud by 2011. That’s a heck of a lot! Public cloud access requires a browser. That’s it.
All of the hardware, application, networking, storage and OS are provided by the vendor. I would argue that you would need some kind of identity management software if you didn’t already utilise such a thing. MyOneLogin is a proven SSO tool from the cloud which if you’re a Google Premier Apps user comes free. Other examples of public cloud are vendors such as Salesforce.com. This public cloud concept is also referred to as Software as a Service or SaaS. In this case you should be the data owner i.e. if ever you decide to switch this service off and go elsewhere then your agreement or SLA should state that you will get your data back in a form that is readable and transferrable. Finally, although also referred to as Public Cloud you will also see public clouds dedicated to large groups of users only, for example the US Government. In my opinion this is the route the NHS should have taken for patient records rather than the £30 billion pounds of spend devoted to BT and the other SI’s and partners which will fail. However I digress again!
Lets tackle the next one which is a private cloud. This is for organisations that need to be assured that the data lives in a unique, known space. A private cloud can live on or off premise and can be managed either by yourself or by a 3rd party. This form of cloud is popular with vendors who still want to sell you lots of tin and software licences, still but its definition is governed by the fact that the only data in this cloud belongs to the organisation. Typical vendors are IBM, HP, Oracle and eventually all of the other suspects.
Ok next up is a hybrid cloud. This is where there is a combination of 2 or more private, public and community clouds that are bound together by technology for reasons of data and application portability. Think of it as it being much the same as integrating your messaging system with your ERP or CRM system on premise, except it isn’t!!
Finally the community cloud. This is a cloud shared by several organisations that have a common purpose Examples could be a government and its various departments, a charity and its donors etc etc. It could be managed by the organisations themselves or a 3rd party and can be on or off premise.
Ok the other buzz phrases you are likely to come across are PaaS or Platform as a service and IaaS or Infrastructure as a service. Both would sit in a cloud environment and could be any of the variants listed above. PaaS refers to suppliers that offer a platform such as programming language and application builders on their infrastructure for the customer to build their own customised applications. The customer may have some control over the hosted environment but does not control the underlying infrastructure i.e. OS, storage, memory, network et al
IaaS is where the customer needs to provision and de-provision additional infrastructure for their own use i.e. choice of OS, CPU, memory, storage and some network. Although the underlying infrastructure is controlled by the vendor, the customer has the perception of infinite growth and instant switch on and off of resources. This environment is proving increasingly popular with customers who have specific pains around software testing, big on and off projects, drug research etc etc. Typical suppliers are Amazon,GoGrid and Rightspace.
Why go for any of these clouds?
Well whichever cloud is of interest they all present several advantages as to how to do IT today. Its very compelling and disruptive especially to the legacy computer vendors whose go to market and value chains are under serious threat.
So what does it provide then?
Economies of scale i.e. computing and networking power on a massive scale which has to be protected and ran with ultimate investment in security and speed.
Elasticity i.e. like the electricity supply coming out of your wall, take as much as you need when you need it, easily.
Financially i.e. potentially move IT spend from Capex to Opex.
Accessibility i.e. capture your information from any device i.e. mobile, netbook or anything that supports a browser
Security. Yes I would argue that most organisations will put their data in a more secure environment than they currently have. It doesn’t matter how much you have spent on security software and hardware if you give out USB sticks, CD’s, floppies (I’m showing my age again) and yes laptops and phones. Read the papers!!
