IT Strategy

Is ‘Cloud Computing’ Feasible?

March 31, 2008 by Raj Sheelvant

According to Nicholas Carr, in his new book The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google we’re in the midst of a transition in computing, moving from our own private hard drives to the computer as access portal. Soon all companies and individuals will outsource their computing systems, from programming to data storage, to companies with huge data farms. This concepts is called ‘Cloud Computing’ or ‘Grid Computing’.

Cloud computing can be bucketed into 2 broad categories: Software as a Service (SaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS). Some SaaS providers have their own data centers. Ex: Google and Microsoft Live. Other companies provide software as a service, but they are hosted on somebody else’s data center. Next are the companies that provide a new breed of services called ‘Platform as a Service’(PaaS). Ex: Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud service or EC2. If a compute job needs to be run, the firms will be able to ship it up there and run it, and all the company needs to pay for is the computing resources used to run the program.

The ideas behind cloud computing aren’t really new, but four factors allow cloud computing to be more successful today.

1. Homogenization of Computing: Continuous pressure on the cost of computing is pushing IT infrastructure in the realm of ‘commoditization’ which in turn is creating homogenization of computing.  
2. Broadband access: Compared to the application service provider (ASP) model in the late 90s, broadband has twice the penetration and is half the price.
3. Economies of Scale: Enabled by the rise of new programming models and new applications designed from day one to run in the network. Ex: The Google programming model provides massive parallelization through a technique called Map/Reduce. Complex problems is split into little problems that all run in parallel.
4. Share data center resources: Multi-tenant software—one code base that supports all users. This model drives up the utilization of servers and greatly lowers the cost of supporting the application software.

But despite these enablers, many barriers prevent rapid adoption of this model, especially in the enterprise. Legacy applications in the Enterprise can’t be reused up in the cloud as they are written today. They don’t take into account the ability to share within multiple users and they don’t deal well with mobile applications. Service providers also need to deal with the complexity, security, and compliance rules around the use of critical enterprise data.

No doubt, cloud computing is a disruptive IT outsourcing model. But it doesn’t yet meet the criteria of enterprise IT and isn’t supported by most of the key corporate vendors according to Forester Report ‘Is Cloud Computing Ready for The Enterprise?’ (you can only read the executive summary for free)

So, because of the barriers mentioned above ‘Cloud Computing’ of Enterprise Application is not feasible yet.

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4. Enterprise Cloud Inevitable?
5. PaaS: Platform in the Cloud?