Beyond Cloud 101: The Next Steps Of Cloud Innovation

23/12/09

By Ahmar Abbas, Senior Vice President, Global Infrastructure Management, CSS Corporation

More small and medium sized businesses are turning to cloud computing to handle a broader range of IT processes previously managed in house. For organizations now considering cloud computing, the technological terminology can be a bit confusing if not daunting. This brief review of different cloud computing options and trends will help IT decision-makers at small and medium sized companies make th right choice for their enterprises.

The key accomplishment for 2009 is that we finally were able to get a workable taxonomy for cloud computing. There is now an agreed...

...upon reference model for cloud computing that provides for the following three deployment models:

a. Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
b. Cloud Platform as A Service (PaaS)
c. Cloud Software as a Service (SaaS)

Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offerings for core components such as computing, storage and network capacity are fairly mature. IaaS also provides content distribution, load balancing, database and message queues as additional infrastructure services. The next step in IaaS will include technology components that are currently available in enterprise data centers. This will include streaming, mail relay, DNS and a set of security technologies that will allow the cloud to be tightly integrated with enterprise datacenter assets. Amazon's IaaS platform continues to lead the charge in continually expanding its IaaS suite of services.

A hindrance to the adoption of IaaS continues to be ala carte pricing models. To establish IaaS costs today, companies need to have extremely accurate and detailed understanding of, for example, how many messages will be sent to the message bus or how many calls will be made to the database. These esoteric heuristics should have no place in the cloud which, in essence, is trying to simplify IT asset deployment and not complicate it.... continued on page two >

 

 

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