One of the key driving factors for all the hype around cloud computing, are the list of benefits that result in from the application and usage of this state of the art IT trend.
In the weeks to come, I will blog about those compelling list of benefits.
Significant Cost Reduction
Cloud computing solutions are available at a fraction of the costs that used to be associated with the traditional IT services. Upfront capital expenditures are eliminated.
In fact, cloud computing models are moving significant elements from the IT budget from capital expenditure column to operational expenditure column in the balance sheet. This indicates, in addition to the reduction in costs, the IT operational efficiencies just got a boost. It is a notorious fact that many IT projects take ages to take off, waiting for that budget to be approved. Now the landscape is changing dramatically, thanks to the operational nature of expenditure, as well as the low cost, that, some of the expenses could even be out of that petty cache box. And more importantly, the benefits from the execution efficiency adds to the overall organizational efficiency.
Cloud computing also dramatically reduces IT administrative burden. As opposed to managing own IT assets, the job is sort of outsourced, to the best in the space. And the IT personnel in the organization can focus on organization specific operations. This is similar to what happened to that mail server. Not as long as three to four years ago, we used to have a mail server managed by our own IT department. And if you have ever dealt with configuring and maintaining a mail server, you will know that the administrative burden, including skills and time it takes, is quite high. Nowadays, for quite reasonable amounts that are much less than those costs compared to managing your own mail server, we can get the mail service from a provider like GMail. And to make the story still appealing, comes the benefit of all other packaged solutions around email, that make the service still attractive. All these added benefits are for a fraction of the costs of hosting and managing your own mail server. Likewise, the cloud computing phenomena can reduce the administrative burden of IT departments for many assets in all spaces, from infrastructure, platform to software.
This is not only true for the use of a public cloud, but also for a private cloud. Compare the cost of providing hardware and software to all different departments in an organization and managing hardware and software maintenance for all those computers to that of a private cloud, where the maintenance is central and updates are transparent. Also, the provisioning could be automated and supported via a self service portal, so that those who want the IT assets can have access to the resources almost immediately, rather than waiting for the IT assets be procured and delivered by the IT department personnel.
And the direct cost reductions come from the fact that, there is no longer the need to have dedicated machines for those activities that run only few hours a day. In the traditional model, there is a dedicated machine, at least a PC, that will be used for those sporadic tasks of the day, and the rest of the time, it sits idle, doing nothing, but still consuming power as well as a space to sit. With the cloud computing model, you cam spawn a virtual instance, run the job, and release the instance. Others who need the resources are now free to use those resources that were freed.
The overall total cost of ownership (TCO) can be cut down by significant amounts.
Comments
Think about a service that runs once a day for an hour. But this service contains certain sensitive information. Yes you can move this on to a VM and host it on a virtualization layer, but how do you guarantee security (there are lots of research still going onto secure VMs) ?
Also what are the implications of private cloud adaptation to a business. Company employees have to be re-trained to use these resources. You must have seen a lot more customers than me and I'm sure you know better than me about their knowledge and the ability. Do you think they are ready or can be easily convertible?
There has to be proper backup plans of these VMs, associated shares storage. Also there has to be a trained personnel for maintaining the cluster with virtualized layer. Don't forget that VMWare ESX and Microsoft Hyper-V are around for sometime but still they are not there yet.
There are tons of hidden costs like the above in adapting private clouds to a company. Even for public clouds, I don't think I need to explain the cons of those (vendor lock-ins, data security, reliability, etc.,)
What I don't like is people portraying cloud computing as the silver bullet. They only talk about pros and never cons.
Cloud computing, if not adapted properly, will be like another dot com crash for most companies.
With the experiences we are going though, trying to host Stratos cloud platform, the vendor locking threat is felt across the IaaS usage layer.
Let alone the security, the performance seem to have problems in the vitalization layer, which make it unusable at times for the PaaS layer.
However, the good news is that, when it comes to PaaS, it is not a must to run that on IaaS. Same is true for SaaS, you do not need a PaaS underneath your SaaS.
Yet the question remains, who will have to deal with the private and public cloud admin and management complexities. And the cloud model itself can help - outsource the complexities. However, I have to agree that, right now, the kind of technical experts required is in short supply in the market. I hope we will have more of those experts, as this domain expands, plus more tools to help manage complexity. Like in the case of OOP to SOA software architecture shift, there needs to be a shift in the way we think and do stuff in the IT departments.
And on the point of cloud treated as the silver bullet, you are dead right. This is where we need to open up the eyes and see. Unfortunately, the dust generated by the hype around has blinded us to see the fact that the cloud is something that floats in the free space. You could use an IaaS and have access to virtual machine instances, or should we not use that Unix server with logins to share the same resources and work around the vitalization overheads. We should remember to use our ability to choose.