Cloud Computing: An important emerging technology
Over many years the IT sector has so often shot itself in the foot with fads and buzz words.
Cloud computing smacks of one of those all too familiar IT buzzwords that engulf our industry. In fact Cloud Computing has real substance and is a dynamic and fast growing emerging new technology. At this stage in its evolution, Cloud Computing is finding resonance with the smaller shared services market, but as the technology matures and acceptance grows, the allure of the “on demand pay as you grow” model may well be increasingly attractive to the enterprise user.
So what actually is it? The term “Cloud” is used as a metaphor for the Internet, based on how the Internet is depicted in computer network diagrams.
The Bunker describes Cloud Computing as an emerging technology infrastructure whereby computer resources are dynamically provisioned on a self service basis over the Internet, via web applications/web services, from an off- site third party provider who shares resources and bills on a utility basis. It is designed for the rapid delivery of computing resources delivered and made available in a simplified way: “on demand” regardless of where the user is or the type of device they are using.
Gartner, with recognised authority, describes it thus:
Cloud Computing is a style of computing where massively scalable, IT enabled capabilities are delivered as a service to external customers using Internet technologies. Cloud can be broken down into three main components:
SaaS, (or Software as a Service) is a means of delivering software over the internet or a private network from a hosted environment.
PaaS, (or Platform as a Service) is a means of facilitating applications development and deployment to run in the Cloud.
Infrastructure as a service allows customers to obtain computer resources from the Cloud; storage, CPU and databases are examples.
Cloud Computing is often confused with grid computing (a form of distributed computing whereby a super computer is composed of a cluster of networked, loosely coupled computers, acting in concert to perform very large tasks, utility computing (the packaging of computer resources, such as computation and storage, as a metered service sold as a utility such as electricity) and autonomic computing (computer systems capable of self management) Indeed many Cloud Computing deployments as of 2009 depend on grids, have autonomic characteristics and bill like utilities – so Cloud Computing can be seen as a natural next step from the grid-utility model.
It is worth noting the inevitable variants that are emerging; Public, Hybrid and Private Clouds. Public Cloud describes cloud computing in the traditional mainstream sense. A Hybrid Cloud environment consisting of multiple internal and/or external providers and a Private Cloud used to describe offerings that emulate cloud environments on private networks and across multiple sites.
The Bunker and Cloud computing
For The Bunker, Cloud Computing fits with our vision of the Data Centre of the future: An Intelligent, secure utility computing centre. But equally we believe there are still big questions around security and reliability. A recent bloggers view pretty much sums up the fears of many and indeed the security concerns of The Bunker “Security, privacy, peace of mind… Three things that are lacking in the cloud… Small companies may decide to take the risk… but soon, someone is going to steal all that info and find something to do with it all”
There are already a number of large cloud providers including Amazon.com, Akamai Technologies, Joyent, and Salesforce.com’s Force.com development platform. Meanwhile, Microsoft and Google are also speculated to be developing pay-per-drink computing services, such as hosted server processing and storage.
Cloud Computing, or a variant of it is an important and developing technology and will in time fundamentally change the way we all access and use IT resources. IBM quote a market size of $42 billion by 2012. The ability of Cloud Computing to accelerate the speed at which users can gain services, bypassing traditional IT departments altogether and unlike other hosting services, pay for computing power based on consumption, will be attractive for the smaller business. One wonders whether at this stage in its development, public Cloud Computing meets the needs of large organisations.
What The Bunker provides.
The Bunker does not provide shared infrastructure. The Bunker’s position on “Public Cloud Computing” is to provide public Cloud service providers the environment to deliver their service to their customers from within Europe’s most secure Data Centre environments staffed 24/7/365 by security and technical engineers who understand the technologies and are ready and able to help keep you running. The infrastructure may be housed in two geographically separated facilities linked to each other and the Internet by a fault tolerant, fully redundant, multi homed gigabit network owned and managed by The Bunker.
The Bunker also provides, from the same managed Data Centre environments, a “Private” cloud in the form of a virtualised environment accessed and purchased on demand.
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