On Demand
Cloud Computing virtualises your entire datacentre. It enables you to take up capacity according to demand not just from internal resources but from external ones too. Cloud Computing takes the service provider model to the next logical level by using the power of the internet and advances recently made in virtualisation technologies to deliver “computing capacity” via an extension of your datacentre using somebody else’s horsepower. It is capacity on demand but without the complex charging mechanisms, ownership models, or physical residency that traditional models have been bound by.
The Datacentre Is The Computer
Providing you have got your head around service oriented infrastructure, and virtualisation, then this next “cloud” step should conceptually not be a big one. Think of the datacentre now not as a physical building containing a myriad of different computing platforms, but as a virtual entity in itself bound by a common “operating system”, utilising all its resources in a cohesive fabric connected by virtualised networks, virtualised processing, virtualised storage, virtualised applications.
Off-Premise Extension
The datacentre becomes the computing service cloud and in doing so can be “extended” using the same rules governed by the datacentre operating system to external clouds of computing resources. These resources can be owned by you (on-premise) or provided by a third party (off-premise). Thus the concept of true capacity upon demand becomes a reality.
Global Aggregation
Clearly this brave new world offers tremendous advantages to the world of business and the environment. Business can save money by resourcing today’s known needs whilst being more effective in delivering the unknown needs of the future without incurring the up-front expense of capacity buffers. Meanwhile an aggregation of these needs can start to take shape in the form of cloud computing thus delivering economies of scale to nature’s own capital reserves such as power and space.
We Do It
Conceptually you’ve now bridged the gap, but is it in fact a leap of faith in practice? Yes and no. The technology is very real – it exists today and is being put into practice by more and more organisations on a daily basis. It is however very new, and therefore with it come some uncertainties with respect to which concept will actually become a standard. Union’s own customer experiences reflect those areas from which we expect cloud computing to establish its initial roots. Those being disaster recovery, on-line transaction processing, and presently commoditised service provider models e.g. software as a service.
