demand budgets to be projected with accuracy, committed to as part of a financial allocation plan and managed with continual diligence and oversight. How do you control IT costs in a services and cloud computing utility billing model, and when should a cloud computing variable cost be converted to an internal IT fixed cost?
Cloud computing will usher in the IT age of the services delivery provider in a similar manner to Internet communications creating the age of the Internet service provider. Every major Internet vendor, IT vendor and carrier wants to be an SDP. Their success and cloud computing's success will depend on their answers to the above five questions.
Is cloud computing just time sharing déjà vu? Not from a 21st century technical perspective but from a corporate benefits/concerns perspective they seem to be one and the same.
Reprinted with permission from Networld World. Story copyright 2008 Networld World Inc. All rights reserved.
Comments
Well written article Frank. It's good to see some folks still remember time sharing.
One additional question potential users may want to consider; is the whether system is centralized or distributed and available in multiple locations or from multiple vendors. Having multiple locations available makes it easier for subscribers to build for business continuity and provide rich responsive user interfaces throughout the world.
On the first, second, and fourth points, folks like Salesforce.com have had to deal with thiat for years and from their success one can conclude that these issues are sufficiently addressed.
On the point about management, there is a long way to go, but companies like Hyperic show promise.
One additional point that could be added is integration. If one business process is handled by, say, Salesforce.com and another by EC2, how can we integrate the data or process in a manageable way?
I manage a datacenter for a medium sized ($3B) manufacturing company and what gets me jazzed up about cloud computing is that I'll be able to be much more nimble with these variable-cost infrastructure elements when the business units or application teams come asking for new servers and storage to support their latest SOA initiative (for example). It's not so much about the unit cost of a megahertz-minute or a gigabyte-month (although I expect that to be compelling too). The question for me is whether we could just do this ourselves with a very well run virtualized infrastructure - but this, too, is non-trivial.
Just want to address a operational concern related to the cloud computing. What about the application migration from the stand alone enviornment ot the cloud computing model ? What about the cost and other enhancement part of migration?
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