Right now “the cloud” is all the rage – it’s become the phrase du jour, and everybody is keen to jump on to the bandwagon. However what many people fail to realise, is that cloud computing isn’t new: the term “cloud computing” has been adopted by marketers to sell things and get people excited. That’s it.
So you’re probably thinking –“what exactly *is* the cloud?” Well cloud computing is a buzzword that means different things to different people (as with Web 2.0). For some, it’s just another way of describing IT outsourcing. However many others use it to mean a computer service provided over the Internet, others argue that anything that sits outside your firewall is part of the cloud. Confused? Don’t be: like I was saying earlier the cloud isn’t a new concept. Chances are, you probably use cloud computing every day and don’t even realise it.
The problem is many companies who have heard about the cloud, now think they need it. They don’t know why, or indeed exactly what they want from it, but they’ve been told it’s the next best thing and that it’ll be cheaper for them as there’s no wastage: the costing model always sounds cheaper and you only pay for what you use – what’s not to like? Well when it comes to hosting, the problem is you need to factor in compute cycles, of which there is no standard measurement or unit so you can’t factor these in with any real confidence.
In reality, we’ve been delivering cloud based solutions to clients for years. All of our high availability infrastructures exist as private clouds. Our web based approach to software is the same benefit as the cloud is being sold on, namely that you can access the software anytime, anywhere and don’t need to maintain/manage your own infrastructure. It’s just software as a service (SaaS) or an application service provider (ASP) which are nothing new – it’s just re-branded.
For example in 2006 because Amazon was only using a fraction of its massive, global, computing power, it started renting out its spare capacity over the net through a new entity called Amazon Web Services; which works exactly like a private cloud but you access your resources through a secure network connection, like an Intranet. Since then Google and many other companies have followed suit, and although these are great products (however they are not a solution for everything) they are inherently shared solutions. The question is – would you consider hosting your business critical application on a shared virtual server? Some would say yes, but for many the security risks would be too high. Having said that though, there are composite methods that can be implemented, for instance we’ve just utilised cloud storage for the backup process for one of our clients.
In the end I guess there’s no harm in re-labelling the internet, we did it with Web2.0, we’re doing it with the cloud and we’ll invariably be doing it again when HTML 5 matures. It’s just the noise, confusion and hype that get’s to me. I just wish there was some sort of public service announcement to explain there’s nothing new here, nothing to see, move along, it’s just a new name for what you’ve already been doing.