Trying to pin down what cloud computing is -- and what its benefits are -- can seem sometimes like trying to pin down a real cloud. But for midsized companies, several benefits are coming into sharper focus as the technology starts to gain some substance.
Cloud computing as we know it today can make you seem bigger to customers, and reduce the cost and footprint of your IT operations at the same time.
Of course, there's plenty of reason to be skeptical, especially with regular news of outages at major providers. And then there's the perpetual concern about security of your data -- which, after all, is your company's lifeblood. But with the technology now starting to gain some real substance behind it (and the economy remaining tight) it's time to seriously consider cloud computing as an option.
First, let's clarify what cloud computing is: It's really just a re-wrapping of outsourcing data center operations and the "application service provider" (ASP) model that failed so spectacularly for so many companies earlier this decade, with a Web-client-friendly front end. In fact, the survivors of the ASP market -- like the former USi, now a business unit of AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T) -- and many hosted data center providers are looking to package their products as cloud computing now because it makes them more attractive to smaller and mid-sized companies.
Many companies offering software as a service (SaaS) market themselves as "cloud," and in many ways, they are: If you're pushing your company's email, or customer relationship management, or other application out to a SaaS provider instead of hosting it in your own server room, then that qualifies as "cloud."
The true benefits of cloud computing, however, come from the ability to go to a provider and quickly provision computing power as you need it. Take, for example, what's now widely known as "Cyber Monday" -- the Monday after Thanksgiving that has become one of the biggest Web-based shopping days of the year.
In a "traditional" e-commerce environment -- where you own a fixed number of servers, and either have them in a rack at a collocation facility or are paying a hosting service for dedicated processing -- scaling up requires adding more servers, configuring additional servers, and adding load balancing. If you're hosting yourself, or using a collocation facility, you can quickly run into bandwidth and rack space trouble.
Cloud computing, on the other hand, is based on virtualized servers and load balancing, so scaling the application up is transparent to you: Provision more compute power, and then turn it off after the peak has passed.
Of course, the problem with this approach in some cloud environments is that the data -- your customer data -- has had to reside in the cloud as well. And other applications that could benefit from on-demand infrastructure haven't been able to leverage the cloud as easily. But as cloud technology is maturing, service providers are now offering ways to apply the cloud model to nearly any application that can run in a virtualized server environment-- and stay connected with systems inside your firewall.
That's the sort of options companies like Hosted Solutions, a Raleigh, N.C., data center hosting provider, have started to provide.
"The hybrid cloud provides a more à la carte approach to cloud services that we provide," says Jeff Kramer, vice president of technology for Hosted Solutions. "Previously, when you purchased our cloud, you purchased the load balancing firewall, the bandwidth, the backup, and compute power all together. What we're doing now is a hybrid option, which allows you to connect your front end in the cloud with your corporate back end. In addition, if you have an infrastructure that's located in our data center, you're able to do a logical extension of your network into our cloud and provision more machines in the cloud."
This hybrid cloud approach means you can aggressively consolidate servers running locally, and rely on cloud assets to scale them up on demand. That kind of efficiency of operations could mean a lot in this economy -- saving rack real estate, electrical costs, and a lot of system management headaches.
— Sean Gallagher is an award-winning IT journalist and veteran technology professional. He is the former director of IT strategy for Ziff-Davis Media, and a former systems integrator. He is also the former head of InformationWeek Labs. Gallagher is now an independent journalist and technology consultant, and lives in Baltimore. You may reach him at: gallagher.sean.m@gmail.com.
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