Cloudipedia – Cloud News

Technologies become essential when they become a part of the very fabric of society. They become essential when they become disruptive. There are a great many new technologies that appear every year, and many of them are technologies designed to make things simpler, cheaper, and more convenient. Yet, most of them do not fall into the category of disruptive technology—or a technology that results in far-reaching and important changes in the way people work, think, do business, and communicate. Cloud computing is one of those disruptive technologies.

• Cloud computing changes the way we work. The very nature of what a “job” is, is changing. We work from home. We work as contractors. We telecommute, work from on the road, and increasingly, pay no attention to the physical boundaries of the corporate brick and mortar walls.

• Cloud computing changes the way we think. Old barriers are being broken down. We’re no longer afraid to think outside the box, because the box no longer exists.

• Cloud computing changes the way we do business. The collaborative technologies that are enabled by the cloud let us take advantage of outsourcing, focusing on our core goals while letting other experts take care of what they do best on our behalf.

• Cloud computing changes the way we communicate. Is it necessary to get on a plane, or drive across town for a meeting? Increasingly, the answer is no. New types of communication allow us to work closely with partners, remote employees, and suppliers around the world as if they were right there in our office.

There are objections, to be sure. There are objections to any disruptive technology. People resisted graphical operating systems. They resisted cellular phones, the Internet, and even computers as a whole, but each of these disruptive technologies won out, and our lives are better for it.

Cloud computing is fast becoming recognized as the fastest growing technology. Gartner’s “Top 10 Strategic Technology Areas for 2010″ lists the ten most important technologies that must not be ignored—and cloud computing is number one on the list.

Cloud computing is destined to become part of our everyday lives, because it is more than technology. It’s not just software that is delivered from a remote server over the Internet. Cloud computing represents a new way of thinking and doing that has become essential to stay competitive and efficient in today’s economy. Here are just a few of the drivers that highlight why cloud computing has grown in importance so quickly:

• Explosion of data. We are truly in the “information age” today. That means we rely on information more than we ever have in the past, but it also means that there’s a lot of it.

• Renewed focus on collaboration. So what do we do with all of that data? Information is usually more valuable if it is strategically shared, not only within the company, but also with partners, suppliers, outsourcers and other stakeholders all around the world.

• Economic necessity. Companies face the continual need to cut costs, especially during the worst economic recession since the ’30s. But even apart from the recession, global competition and other factors have led companies to embark on major cost-cutting initiatives. This involves both implementing new methods, and cutting staff.

• Entrepreneurial activity. The economic recession has a positive impact on entrepreneurial activity. The result is that there are more small companies today than ever before, and those small companies need access to resources at low cost. Cloud computing allows those small entrepreneurial ventures to gain access to the services they need and flourish.

• Outsourcing. Outsourcing and cloud computing go hand-in-hand. The outsourcing trend is driven by economic necessity described above, and it flourishes because of the intense amount of entrepreneurial activity that we’re seeing, from two perspectives. Many of the small entrepreneurs that are launching their companies today are outsourcing providers. And the demand on the part of larger existing companies for cost-cutting further drives the need for outsourcing. Cloud computing provides the framework for outsourcing to exist.

• Teleworking and telecommuting. Yes, people are working at home, and companies are allowing it, in part out of the effort to keep costs in check. Cloud computing has provided the framework to allow a new era of working at home to become reality.

With so many factors coming into play at once, we’re seeing a “perfect storm” that can have only one end result: Cloud computing becomes pervasive. In every one of the above drivers, cloud computing is what makes it happen.

The evolution of cloud computing

If you’d like to see where cloud computing is going, you simply look at the evolution of earlier computing platforms. In the 1996 documentary “Triumph of the Nerds”, Steve Jobs described his early vision to take the desktop to the masses: “It was very clear to me that while there were a bunch of hardware hobbyists that could assemble their own computers, or at least take our board and add the transformers for the power supply and the case the keyboard and go get, you know, et cetera, go get the rest of the stuff. For every one of those, there were a thousand people that couldn’t do that, but wanted to mess around with programming – software hobbyists.”

Interestingly, today’s cloud infrastructure is similar to the desktops of the ’80s in several respects. Although it ultimately benefits the ordinary end user, it’s mostly the techies that get excited about it and that continue to refine it. The result will be the same. Just as PCs were once seen as something “with potential” but nonetheless only used by a handful of “hobbyists” as Jobs puts it—or “geeks”, to not put so fine a point on it; cloud computing is seeing the same evolution. In the future, cloud toolkits and platforms will make the cloud as easy to use as today’s desktop computer; and will become as ordinary and accepted as the desktop or laptop PC.

So where did the concept of “cloud computing” come from? It goes all the way back to the origins of the Internet itself. The Internet was always seen in diagrams as a cloud, even before the term “cloud computing” came into use. The idea was that, as described by Google’s Kevin Marks, it “comes from the early days of the Internet where we drew the network as a cloud . . . we didn’t care where the messages went . . . the cloud hid it from us.”  The internet therefore gave us the first cloud, which centered around networking. Later, data abstraction added another layer to it. Today, the cloud abstracts the entire environment: infrastructure, platforms, and data and applications.

Why cloud computing is already becoming mainstream

Why do people use cloud computing? The Pew Internet & American Life Project  noted several reasons: 51 percent of users who take advantage of cloud computing do so because it is easy and convenient; 41 percent do so because of the advantage of being able to access data from any location and any computer; and 39 percent do so because it promotes easy sharing of information. The advantages below all point to mainstreaming of the technology.
• Collaboration
• Scalability
• Better performance
• Reliability
• Simplicity

The last point, simplicity, is perhaps one of the greatest driving forces of the cloud. Let’s face it, there is an element of laziness involved, and that’s okay. Workers everywhere want their jobs to be easier. Cloud computing provides that. Working at home in the past, may have required a user (or the user’s admin) to pre-load software into the user’s home computer, and install special logins for accessing the corporate server. More often than not, that burden just led people to inaction, which resulted in fewer telecommuting opportunities. Cloud computing simplifies the entire process by removing the need for client software and by abstracting the data and application servers. Simply put, if it’s easy, workers will go for it. And in the end, that helps the corporation get things done.

Business users, consumers, and software developers ignore cloud computing at their own peril. Remember when Windows first came out, and there was still a large contingent of people who insisted on sticking with the command-line interface? Those who resist the cloud model are in the same category today. Cloud computing and SaaS is increasingly impossible to ignore.
Why? Everything in computing has led to this moment. Web 2.0 technology first gave us a little taste of what true interactivity and collaboration over the Internet could do for us. While earlier Internet sites gave us information on static web sites, Web 2.0 raised the bar with blogs, social networking, instant connectivity, and a new level of interactivity over the web. Instead of just reading a web site, we could interact with it. We could send feedback. Take polls. Search for products we like, compare prices, and see what other people thought. We could hold web conferences and use things like shared whiteboards. These Web 2.0 innovations put us all in the mindset of free collaboration, unfettered by physical boundaries. Web 2.0 made it possible for the first time to hold a productive conference for example, between people in Chicago, Delhi, and London. We have gotten accustomed to Web 2.0 innovations and cannot go back to the way it was, and we want more. Cloud computing was the next logical step.

Cloud computing has gone mainstream also because of the presence of a robust infrastructure. Virtualization technology has come to the fore, and this too serves a major role in letting vendors deliver SaaS services and in letting companies gain access to infrastructure services without large capital expenditures.
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Cloud Software (Software-as-a-Service, or SaaS)

The most important, and most visible of the three elements is Cloud Software, without which there is no need for Platforms or Infrastructure.

Again to stress, cloud computing and cloud software, i.e. software-as-a-service (SaaS), are not the same things. The two terms are often used interchangeably, but it would be incorrect to do so. Rather, cloud software is just the software part of the cloud computing triad. It is without a doubt though, the most visible part, since it faces the end user. In a purist sense, true cloud-enabled software refers only to that software which intentionally takes advantage of the of other cloud computing technologies: namely cloud infrastructure and cloud platforms.

The overall market for SaaS subscriptions, compared to on-premises software, is still young, though it is a rapidly growing niche. Because it is the most visible part of cloud computing though, it will be SaaS that drives the growth of cloud computing. Already we are seeing this growth, driven both by startups moving into SaaS offerings from the ground up, as well as established IT giants like Google and Microsoft moving into the SaaS market. Almost every major software vendor today has at least a test SaaS program in the works, and many have them in the market already.

When we talk about software-as-a-service, it usually means that the software being delivered has a common code base that is delivered to multiple users. This however, does not preclude customization. Using a common code base for SaaS applications has a big advantage, in that it allows the SaaS provider to continuously refine the program, and push those refinements out to each user on a timely basis. This not only makes for a more robust piece of software, it also allows the cost to be shared between many users. Customization however, is still allowed. Each end user may for example, be able to choose from multiple software components to create a SaaS application that very specifically meets their own precise needs; and of course, just like most types of on-premises software; SaaS applications allow each end user to apply their own user preferences and custom configuration.

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For most people, the term “cloud platform” is even fuzzier than cloud computing as a whole. Yet, when cloud platforms are properly understood and embraced, they potentially offer the greatest impact over any other aspect of cloud computing.

Cloud platforms can drive down software engineering costs tenfold, reduce time to market, improve profit margins, and lower risks. They can promote higher levels of security and system interoperability, and can allow system integrators to enter into new markets within days, instead of years. They can dramatically lower the skill requirements needed to create new software applications, so that entrepreneurs are empowered to serve their customers, and customers are empowered to serve themselves. In a nutshell, cloud platforms takes cloud computing to the masses.

Let’s start with a simplistic understanding of the term “platform” for computing, and then we will expand our definition to the realm of cloud computing.

A platform generally refers to a “prefab” software architecture upon which you can build computing solutions. It provides core software functionality, which would otherwise need to be engineered from the ground up. Can you imagine building an oven every time you wanted to cook dinner? Probably not. Fortunately, the oven is already built; otherwise your meals would cost $500 each.

Likewise, the cloud needs platforms to do a lot of the grunt work, which otherwise needs to be engineered into every software application from the ground up at great expense. Cloud platforms serve as a launch pad for cloud software, providing “prefab” functionality such as a user interface, user sign up and administration, role-based security, federated search, multi-tenant data management and so on. If you’re asking the question, “What the heck is multi-tenant data management?” then exactly! You’re seeing the point. It’s complicated stuff, and you wouldn’t want to program it to every app. Unfortunately, most cloud developers are not talking full advantage of platforms.

By their very definition, cloud platforms are offered “as a service”, meaning that you can use them over the Internet with no need to ever install, upgrade or host. Cloud platforms are readily distinguished from other platforms, which require installations, uploads, downloads and managed hosting. As-a-service means that cloud platforms are easy to use. More important, if you build cloud software on top of a cloud platform, then your solution is inherently cloud-enabled, taking advantage of underlying cloud infrastructure, elasticity and as-a-service models.

Cloud platforms also may include online tools and APIs that make it easier for developers to build on top of the platform. When choosing a cloud platform, it’s important to make sure that the API is open, allowing for integration with 3rd-party, open source and legacy software and web services, otherwise, you could become overly locked into the platform provider for all your needs. This is referred to as an “open platform” versus “proprietary vendor lock-in.”

Major Benefits of Cloud Platforms

On the surface, it’s easy to think that cloud platforms are for software developers, but it’s the IT buyers who are suffering the most from astronomical software engineering costs and delays.

For IT buyers, investors and developers, the advantages of cloud platforms are tremendous. Creating a cloud application from the ground up is a complex process, involving not just ordinary coding, but also adding a layer of abstraction, and incorporating a far-flung communications layer as well as security protocols. If every SaaS provider had to create each of these things from scratch, then cloud-based application development would be hindered, and limited to only the larger software companies. Cloud platforms address this problem by allowing developers to build cloud applications on top of an existing architecture that includes core functionality. In essence, developers can use platforms to get their software to “80-yard line” without programming, and avoid reinventing the wheel.

The benefits are many:
• Lower costs – In some cases, a cloud platform can reduce costs by 80% or more, because non-core code is already engineered;
• Lower risks – Likewise, a cloud platform can reduce risks by as much, because common functions are already tested, sometimes over a period of years;
• Faster time-to-market – Cloud platforms dramatically reduce time-to-market, because they serve as a launch pad for software engineering efforts;
• Higher profit margins – Software developers and system integration firms can deliver more for substantially less, thus higher margins on fixed price contracts;
• Rapid prototyping – Create and deploy concept applications without writing code;
• Higher security and interoperability – NIST indicates that the cloud suffers from major security issues, largely because vendors are implementing disparate and unproven security models. Cloud platforms provide a common, proven security model. If cloud software uses the platform, then it is inherently secure.

As an added advantage, cloud platforms shield both software engineers and end-users from the behind-the-scenes complexities of the entire cloud. Dan Tapscott, the author of Wikinomics, talks about the growing complexity problem this way: “the Web look[s] increasingly like a traditional librarian’s nightmare — a noisy library full of chatty components that interact and communicate with one another.” He is referring to the cloud as a cluttered hodgepodge of Web apps and services, each with their own logins, data sources and security/resource functions. In the absence of cloud platforms, we are recreating the wheel millions of times over. In a few years, the redundancies will drive up costs by billions within federal IT systems, health-IT systems and other enterprise IT systems that rely on cloud services. All these IT systems will struggle with disparate security models and interoperability concerns.

Unfortunately, cloud platforms remain vastly underutilized. That’s why some enterprise software systems unnecessarily cost millions of dollars and take years to implement, only to eventually fail! The resistance to platforms is sometimes baffling. It’s almost as if the logic is to stick with what we know, even though it doesn’t work. Ironically, some software integrators are creating totally proprietary stovepipes from the ground-up, just to avoid platforms. As a result, IT buyers are paying more than twice as much for their systems, and being locked into developers. Instead, they should be taking advantage of open APIs that are available with some of the more open cloud platforms.

Cloud Platforms as Middleware

It may also help to think of a cloud platform as the middle layer of a three-layer cake, in that it rests between the hardware and the software. Sure, you can remove the middle layer, but in doing so you’re also removing a lot of important “cake” that somebody needs to bake from scratch. In the case of software engineering, that’s some expensive cake. That is to say that software can be built without using cloud platforms, but the costs of doing so can be detrimental; and creates a barrier to entry for all but the largest development shops. You see – platforms actually do a lot more than just provide core functionality for software. They also lower the time and risks of engineering software dramatically because the platform engineers have already worked out the devils in the details on their own dollar.

Platforms also reduce the software footprint and maintenance costs, because the responsibility for maintaining platform code is essentially outsourced to a platform provider, who achieves economies of scale by maintaining one system.

Web software that is created without platforms is considerably more costly. On the other hand, cloud platforms provide core functionality that dramatically reduces time, risk and development costs.

Types of Platforms

Cloud platforms come in many shapes and sizes, depending on the application at hand. Arguably, Google is currently dominating the consumer app platform, whereas Facebook is dominating the social networking platform, and Salesforce.com is trying to make a footprint as an enterprise software platform. Several other players, Yahoo included, offer ecommerce platforms, which have driven down the time, risk and cost of ecommerce solutions.
The term “platform” as it relates to cloud computing is often misused to refer to customizable software. Software that can be customized is simply that: customizable software. Similarly, cloud infrastructure vendors sometimes promote their products inaccurately as platforms.  A platform, on the other hand, is something entirely different. A cloud platform rests between the physical infrastructure and customizable software.
Enterprise Platforms

Of all types of platforms, enterprise business platforms may provide the greatest value in the near future, simply because enterprise business systems are extremely expensive – sometimes costing $10s of millions to engineer. By enterprise business system, we’re referring to the types of scalable multi-user / multi-tenant cloud-enabled software that government agencies and Fortune 500 companies spend millions on, sometimes without blinking an eye. For enterprise business systems, platforms offer such great benefit only because the engineering costs are otherwise so high, sometimes representing more than 95% of the total cost of ownership.

Significance of Platforms

In the future, cloud platforms will make the cloud easier to use. To fully understand the significance of cloud platforms, we need simply look at the evolution of earlier computing models.  Can you imagine a world without desktop operating systems? We, the authors of this book, don’t need to imagine. We were there.

In the early days, PCs were hard to use; and security was terrible because every software program implemented its own way of doing the same things. The early PCs were only usable by an elite community of hacker geeks or well-funded NASA engineers. They were expensive to program, because old-time developers would author hundreds of lines of source code just to move a mouse or paint lines on a screen.

Then came operating systems like Microsoft Windows and toolkits like VisiCalc.  All of a sudden, anyone could use a PC. Secretaries were creating spreadsheets for their bosses. The mouse moved automatically, as if by magic. Inasmuch as some techies might knock Microsoft, their Windows platform indisputably changed personal computing. Think about it – for about $100, you get tens of millions of lines of code, which handle thousands of things that we take for granted, and which would otherwise need to be painstakingly engineered the into every software application at the cost of millions of dollars and years of development time. These days, no one in their right mind would remotely consider writing a software application directly to a PC without using some sort of platform, yet that’s exactly what Web developers are doing each and every day!
The cloud platform is evolving in many of the same ways as desktop computing. Cloud platforms are helping to bring cloud software to the masses. As the cloud increases in its complexity, the role of platforms is becoming more important.

Cloud Platforms are like Operating Systems for the Cloud

We tend to think of an operating system as a behind-the-scenes technology that manages resources, and that’s true. But in fact, they do much more than that. There is a major user-facing element to an operating system. Windows, for example, makes the underlying infrastructure easier to use. It provides a common user interface, a common security model, and shields users from all of those behind-the-scenes complexities.

A cloud platform works the same way. The platform implements a virtual instance of a core set of functionality, with common features such as user signup, security, reporting, and so forth. The platform will then allow developers to build on top of that instance to customize it for their specific needs, and to additionally build features on top of the platform without programming, such as creation of forms, data entry collection, report writing, etc. As a result, users can log into one place and experience an integrated solution, where they do whatever they do.

We’ve informally defined cloud computing as “computing on the Internet, as opposed to computing on a desktop.” A more purist definition of cloud computing is one that differentiates true cloud computing from mere software on the Web. After all, Web software has been around for more than a decade and cloud computing is relatively new, so how can they possibly be the same things, right?

Rather, true cloud computing takes advantage of new enabling technologies and cloud constructs, which are making the movement possible. In essence, Web software has been around for years, but until recently it has been prohibitively costly for the masses to develop and host – often costing millions of dollars and taking years to develop and implement. Cloud computing changes all that by incorporating virtualization technology that allows the physical infrastructure to be rented for mere pennies compared to the old ways to engineer Web software. It further changes the equation by providing cloud-specific platform toolkits to accelerate development.

 The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) puts it this way:
“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.” 
NIST also categorizes cloud computing into three “as a service” offerings, namely infrastructure, platforms and software, which are broken down in more detail here.  We will start with Cloud Infrastructure (Infrastructure-as-a-Service, or IaaS)…..

Cloud Infrastructure (Infrastructure-as-a-Service, or IaaS)
In the old days, if you needed a server, you might spend between five and ten thousand dollars or more upfront and then you’d pay a techie $30K a year plus benefits to manage it. Nowadays, with cloud infrastructures, you can actually buy a “virtual server” over the Internet almost as easy as signing up for an email account. The server never arrives at your doorstep. Instead it stays out on the cloud where you can log on and manage it anywhere and anytime over the Internet. For the techies amongst us, that means that you can buy and manage processing time (CPU time), storage, network capacity, and other fundamental computing resources without shelling out big bucks upfront. You only pay for what you use.

If you’ve never used cloud infrastructure, then the very notion of using a server over the Internet may sound crazy. You’re probably asking the question, “How can I do that?” Well, actually, it’s easy to rent computers over the Internet. The easiest way to learn is to actually do it. If you go to Amazon.com’s EC2 website, you can launch and manage a real live server (well, actually a small virtual server) for an hour for about 20 cents. What a bargain!  You will specify a server name, the type of operating system and other details to create your server instance.  Then, you can log on using remote desktop or visit the website, just as if it were a real live server.
How it Works

We use the term “virtual server”, because you’re not really renting a physical box. That is, you can’t actually walk into a room and touch your dedicated machine. Instead, it’s all managed by “virtualization” software, such as VMware.
In the old days, one operating system would run on one physical box. For example, you would buy a Windows server that contained a copy of Windows, or a Linux server that contained a copy of Linux. It was one-to-one. Virtualization, on the other hand, lets you run multiple operating systems on the same box. 

In the early days of virtualization, this was a handy trick. For example, virtualization made it easy to test new software on multiple operating systems without needing multiple physical boxes. Virtualization also made it easy to run Windows and UNIX programs on the same physical box, such as when a program was only available for one operating system. 

Then, one day, somebody realized an even bigger trick. With virtualization, it’s possible to sell the same physical machine multiple times. That is, a data center can run 10 copies of Linux on one box, and then sell it over the Internet like different servers? Voila, the basic concept behind cloud infrastructure (infrastructure-as-a-service).

In reality, cloud infrastructure is not limited to a single server, but rather relies on a shared pool of servers, whereby any one user can scale up to take advantage of extra computing power when needed. It works because servers are mostly unused anyway, so there’s always some extra computing power available if the pool is large enough. It works somewhat like a bank that loans the same money 10 times over. In theory, it wouldn’t work if everyone demanded their money (or computing power) at the same time.

So where is all this infrastructure?

The cloud’s infrastructure consists of actual, physical hardware that is complemented by a delivery mechanism. The main difference is that it exists outside of the user’s immediate grasp, and its existence has been abstracted to the point where its exact location is both unknown and irrelevant to the users. When you work in the old way, you know that your application is located on the PC in front of you, and the data is held on the data server in the room across the hall. With cloud computing, you don’t know whether your applications and data are in a data center in Des Moines or Delhi, and what’s more, it doesn’t make any difference.

This is an important point. One of the biggest objections to cloud infrastructure is that you can’t put your finger on it. There is a certain satisfaction to walking into your server room, and being able to point to a rack of servers and storage arrays with a glorious mass of cables coming out of the back, and saying “that’s where our data and applications are.” But that satisfaction is an illusion; in reality, there is no inherent advantage in being able to reach out and touch your own hardware infrastructure. If it works, it works; it doesn’t really matter where it lives. In fact, if your infrastructure is elsewhere at a hosted facility, then you are gaining a strategic advantage of having somebody else who specializes in such things manage it for you.

An ordinary computing infrastructure may consist of several physical pieces of hardware and cables that you must maintain and allocate. A cloud infrastructure consists of a pool of highly abstracted and scalable infrastructure devices existing in multiple provider data centers, connected over virtual private Internet connections; where a trusted third party is charged with maintenance and allocation.

Virtualization

Virtualization is the behind-the-scenes enabling technology that makes cloud infrastructure possible. Just as you can drive a car without understanding how the engine works, so too is virtualization. You don’t need to know how virtualization works to use it, since it involves the infrastructure—which the end user no longer has to worry about with a cloud implementation. The concept of server virtualization allows many “virtual servers” to run on a single physical server as if each one were a separate device. Storage virtualization works the same way. Both types of virtualization essentially decouple the function from the underlying hardware, and virtualization has become a common enterprise technology for saving money and making better use of existing resources. It’s not uncommon for a large enterprise to employ this technique in its own data center, and the technology is also in common use by cloud providers—delivering an efficient method for them to service the needs of multiple clients on a cost-effective and secure basis.

Why does virtualization make better use of resources? Because of technologies like thin provisioning. In storage for example, traditionally a volume was created for each application. This storage volume was always over-provisioned, to ensure that adequate storage would always be available; as a result, it was common for storage environments to be making use of only 30 percent or so of available storage. Virtualization uses thin provisioning to allocate storage virtually, instead of absolutely; freeing all of that previously trapped storage space. Server virtualization also makes better use of resources by not requiring separate, dedicated hardware servers for each application. In virtualizing servers, it allows for a single physical server to act as multiple virtual servers, each one separated absolutely by a virtual division that isolates each one. The “walling off” of the virtual servers within the single physical server addresses the obvious concern that there would be some potential for somebody else on the same physical server to access your data.

This is an important concept for cloud computing, since cloud computing is all about abstraction. For the end user again, the concept of applications and storage is abstracted to the highest degree—and in many cases the user will not even be aware of where the actual application or data is located. And it doesn’t matter. Virtualization works hand in hand with cloud computing to provide the abstraction that is necessary for both. Virtualization provides a type of technology that allows applications to be moved around freely onto different devices that exist in the cloud, transparently to the end user.
Next, we’ll talk about Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS).

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To the casual end user who is just trying to get some work done there may seem to be little difference between cloud computing, desktop computing, and any other type of computing model that has been floated around over the past few decades. He or she may even use the same types of software applications to do the exact same types of things. That’s the point! Cloud computing offers a better way to do the same types of things.

So then, why is cloud computing any better than ordinary desktop computing?

The answer depends on who you are.

Cloud computing for end-users

As an end user, cloud computing lets you run software applications and access data from any place and time, and from any computer; without the need to ever install, upgrade, troubleshoot software applications physically on a local desktop or server. This is one of the most important elements of cloud computing, and why it has become so popular today. In a sense, cloud computing outsources the technical hassles to someone else.

Cloud computing also makes it easier to do work anytime and from anywhere, often referred to as “ubiquitous.” The old model of working involved going to the office from 8:00 to 5:00, and getting on a plane and taking a business trip or two every year. If we did work from a location outside of the office, then when we returned to the office, time had to be spent synchronizing the ad hoc work done at home with the in-office systems. Today’s model of working is different. We can get just as much done at home or on the road as we can in the office. We can connect instantly to the office from anywhere in the world, gain secure access to our applications and data, and in short, get things done in a way that was never before possible.

Cloud computing for system administrators

Keep in mind that almost all PC owners have become system administrators in a way, unless we’re fortunate enough to have access to a teenager to install and manage things for us. If your PC has ever crashed and wasted your day, then you’ll understand the benefits of somebody else doing the dirty work. The problems can get out of control inside big companies, which manage thousands of software configurations, and pay employees whether their PCs work or not. The superiority of the cloud model comes in when we start to realize that desktop applications are more or less static, and cloud applications can be continuously refined. Desktop applications must be physically installed on a PC, upgraded periodically, have patches applied when they become available, and re-installed when the user moves to a new desktop or when the old one crashes. The cloud model eliminates those inconveniences. Need a new PC? Just buy one. You can still access your cloud applications without having to re-install anything. System administrators, who may need to manage hundreds, or even thousands of desktops, remote devices, servers, storage arrays and other equipment, quickly get bogged down—and the cloud model makes their lives easier.

Cloud computing for software developers

There is an even bigger advantage on the development end. Because the applications are delivered from a common code base from a central location, upgrades to the application, patches and fixes can be pushed out to the user transparently. Desktop applications require the user to actively install a patch, or at least, allow for an auto-connection to take place. Microsoft Windows uses the auto-update feature, which has become very useful and convenient, for example. However, it still requires patience on the part of the end user, who must wait for the upgrade to come in over the Internet, and then must re-boot the system for it to take effect. A cloud application, since it does not exist on the desktop, does not have that requirement. All upgrades take place on the back end, requiring no intervention, action, attention or patience from the end-user. This makes it much easier for developers to continuously upgrade their applications, and to push those upgrades out to users on a real-time basis. Going a level deeper to the platform stage, cloud computing gives developers another critical advantage. Since the platform provides developers with a common set of cloud services that have already proven to be robust, all applications are that much more stable—and quicker to completion, as well.

Cloud computing for IT buyers, corporate and federal

The critical advantages listed above have not been lost to corporate users. The ability to lessen the workload on system administrators and developers alike lets companies save dollars spent on manpower. In short, your company can do more with less, and with greater efficiency. Besides the manpower advantage, companies will also gain an advantage in terms of reduced capital expenditures. Why? The cloud not only reduces time spent on admin duties and development, it also addresses the physical infrastructure itself. Companies taking full advantage of cloud computing will enjoy a reduced need for servers and storage arrays—providing another source of savings (and in turn, reducing the system admin overhead even further).

In the corporate world, one of the most important parts of business is improving the bottom line. That’s done either through increasing revenue, or by decreasing costs. When decreasing costs, the ideal scenario is to do so while still maintaining the same or better level of efficiency the company enjoyed before the decrease in costs; cloud computing provides the answer to that need. Let’s take a look at a few of the dollars-and-cents statistics:

Enterprise software represents an enormous expense, as some $800 billion a year is spent on purchasing and maintaining software. The bulk of that—or about 80 percent of the $800 billion—is spent not on the actual purchase of software, but on installing and maintaining it.[1] The federal government alone spends $70 billion a year on IT systems, much of which goes toward enterprise systems. Most servers operate at only about 15 percent capacity at most times, and over-provisioning is regrettably common. Virtualization, an important element of cloud computing, allows the data center operator to make full use of server capacity. Enterprise cloud platforms can save even more.

The advantage to individuals, small businesses and large enterprises which buy software is obvious. The cost of software represents a major expense for businesses of all sizes. The presence of cloud computing options has allowed many small and midsize businesses to gain access to important features of high-end, enterprise-class software that would not otherwise be available. As a result, a major barrier to success has been dissolved, and the saga of million-dollar price tags for enterprise software is nearing an end. Large corporations will save money; and smaller companies will gain the advantage of being able to access more software resources, which were previously unavailable due to either high cost, or the software simply being unavailable for smaller implementations.