How cloud works
So the idea of saving that much money has caught your attention, and now you may be asking, “What exactly is this whole cloud computing thing anyway?”
“The idea behind it is other companies would be able to achieve economies of scale by providing the services and capabilities that you would normally host in your own organization within your infrastructure,” Lieberman says. … “You’re outsourcing to another company some of the more fundamental things that may be better off done externally.”
Dave Hitz is the co-founder and executive vice president of NetApp, a company that sells enormous amounts of storage to people that need it. For example, Yahoo stores all of its e-mail accounts on his equipment, and the special effects for “Avatar” were stored on his equipment, as well. His company doesn’t offer cloud services, but many cloud environments are built on top of his storage. From his perspective, Hitz sees two different definitions of cloud computing.
“Definition No. 1 of cloud computing is you no longer buy a computer,” Hitz says. “You access computing service over the Internet to somebody else’s data centers, and they spend the capital and they hire the people to build them and they do everything, and all you do is pay a monthly bill and access the service over the Internet. Style No. 2 of cloud computing is a completely technical definition (that) has to do with if you’re going to build a data center, what does the architecture look like? And if the architecture has a lot of shared infrastructure, then people tend to call that kind of environment a cloud computing environment.”
His first definition is another benefit to cloud because it eliminates many IT headaches because, being honest, how often do you have an overly positive IT experience?
“I imagine people would say they’re experience with IT has been less than optimum,” says John Dillon, CEO of Engine Yard Inc., a company that delivers an environment for software developers to write programs that run inside the cloud. “The reason is you spend so much money building all this infrastructure, that going the last mile, which is where you write the application that interfaces with the human, the user, doesn’t get the attention, doesn’t get the money and doesn’t get the investment.”
The idea of the cloud is essentially that you plug into the wall, and you get a whole data center.
“It’s IT as a service, just as you get electricity or water,” Dillon says. “In business, you, in most cases, don’t have your own power plant, you didn’t dig your own well, you didn’t build your own building, you don’t have your own fire department or police department. So why on earth do we basically give power to a group to build something that has been built before in-house, and then hope it works?”
Dillon also points out that in the United States, capital expenditures are a huge expense. In fact, about 50 percent of capital expenditures in America are information technology.
“Unbelievable,” Dillon says. “How many people are getting the ROI on this? What’s happening with the cloud is some big companies are saying, ‘Look, I’ll build the data center.’ It’s changing who buys, why it’s bought, and it changes the capacity and the economic decision-making process around IT.”
Moving to cloud technologies can take some of the capital expenditures and turn them into operational expenditures instead.
“The advantages are no software loaded, the data is backed up automatically, when there are upgrades, the vendor does the upgrade,” Lieberman says. “It becomes less of what would be a (capital expenditure) and becomes a monthly (operating expenditure), so the cost is known, fixed and predictable, whereas the upgrade cycle of equipment and software and hiring IT can be significant and unpredictable.”
When you look at how much money most organizations spend on their IT systems, these cost savings are a big driver and will, ultimately, be a game changer for business.
“Amazon, who is a leader in cloud technology, told me that they think it’s a $1 trillion a year potential business,” Dillon says. “So if there’s a trillion dollars at stake, that means every company within 50 miles of here is going to make a really big bet, and it’s so disruptive because the buyers are going to change and the sellers are going to change.”
The other benefit aside from cost is that everything that is on your PC is now in one location that can be accessed from anywhere — not just from the PC itself — and that comes with numerous benefits.
“When you take your software and your applications and your data and you move it to the cloud, something’s happened,” McNaught says. “First off, the cloud is the data center of your company and you can always get to it. You’re connected to the Internet, so you can get there from home, from the conference center, from the airport. And guess what? Because it’s not on a PC with a hard drive failing and memory getting filled up, it’s protected. It’s backed up. It’s secure. So the cloud provides this real opportunity to take the things that make up our work life, and within five years our home life, as well, and move them to this one place where we can always find our stuff.”
