So, what is the big hoopla about Cloud Computing? This term gets thrown around a lot these days. You read about it in publications, you hear the term on T.V, on Social Media. If you happen to work in the Information Technology field, you probably have encountered the term more than once but depending on your skillset, line of work within IT, it might still be a buzz word..
Let's get to it.
What is Cloud Computing?
Cloud Computing is information technology (IT) offered as a service. It eliminates the need for organizations to build and maintain expensive data centers and for some, 'a lot of headaches'. It enables organizations and/or companies to stand up new systems quickly and easily by tailoring the provisioning of these systems as services on-demand.
The term used with Cloud Computing is 'elasticity'. By elasticity, we mean that it provides a flexible/extensible way of deploying application components in a virtualized environment as needed in response to market demands.
Most implementations of Cloud Computing have a 'Pay as you go rental' model allowing organizations to defer costs. No longer do companies have to spend huge sums of money to keep the lights running! No more having to spend huge fees on licensing and maintaining 3rd Party vendor products in order to run the applications needed for business.
No more worrying about Disaster Recovery Plans (DRP). This falls under the SLA (Service Level Agreement) of the vendor who is offering the Cloud Computing Services.
Last but not least - Companies are always looking to reduce their IT budget by either laying off individuals or shifting the work Off-Shore to places such as India, China, and others which supposedly offer low cost resources. Cloud Computing allows this goal to be fullfilled in some cases for such companies whose business models are tailored towards Cloud Computing.
Let's continue:
Some people may disagree but let's face it, IT is critically important. Without it, most organizations would not exist, and would not be able to function in today's world. The bigger the company, the larger the IT staff and budget tends to be. These organizations typically create a maze of processes, procedures, disparate systems, that over time, don't communicate very well with each other, and of course, become outdated, costly to run. Instead of supplementing the core business of a company, the IT component of the organization becomes a liability over time and saddles the 'mother ship' with debts, instead of fullfilling its primary purpose - 'Accelerate growth of core products', 'speed to market', and whatever other buzzwords, the executives may want to coin.
Therefore, the need to externalize non core capabilities, (i.e.) IT, makes an even better case for Cloud Computing.
Before the introduction of Cloud Computing, most large companies externalized IT by doing large outsourcing contracts with IT Service Contractors. However, these one stop shops, while at times, fullfilling such promises, more than often, fell short of such goals. While large outsourcing deals are still in effect for a good many companies today, and probably will remain so for some time in the future, these types of relationships have never met the 'elasticity' test very well.
Cloud Computing offers many benefits over the traditional IT outsourcing model because of the on-demand; 'pay as you go rental' nature of its component and pieces. The service can be implemented application by application over time, thereby allowing organizations and companies to tailor their needs.
This is what the hoopla is all about.!!! Now, can everything be implemented via Cloud Computing? Certainly not - Stay tuned for a future update on this topic and more.