Private, Not Proprietary Cloud Computing

26/11/2009

By Graham Spittle, Vice President of IBM UK

Today companies are turning to cloud computing as they seek a new flexible, reliable, and responsive IT model to handle the massive amounts of digital information that are the lifeblood of today’s interconnected world.

The research firm IDC predicts that over the next decade cloud computing will transform how IT is purchased, sourced and provisioned. Gartner Research expects high growth for cloud computing products and services through 2013. Cloud computing is gaining momentum amid the rising costs of energy, a challenging economy and an explosion in Web-based data.

Most media attention is...

...currently focused on public or external cloud-based services, which are available to clients from a third-party service provider, via the Internet. The term "public" does not always mean free, even though it can be free or fairly inexpensive to use. Frequently the vendor offers hosted pay-for-use infrastructures. Public clouds usually offer non-core standardised and commoditised services.

The scope of cloud computing, however, is larger than external clouds alone. Cloud computing platforms can be private as well as public, and hybrid architectures are emerging to integrate private and public platforms. As with most technologies, this new model continues to adapt to meet evolving needs.

At its most basic, cloud computing is both a business model and a user experience. It is an approach to a shared IT infrastructure in which large pools of computer systems are linked together to provide IT services. It meets the high-performance demands of the dynamic Web in which massive amounts of information is processed in split seconds.

Companies need the advanced technologies that cloud computing offers in order to exchange digital information around the world, and across a variety of devices. With cloud computing, companies can quickly deploy new applications and... continued on page two >

 

 

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