Trying Cloud Computing – One term does not fit all!
So over a year into the Cloud Computing marketing machine, does anyone really understand what it is? You hear about vendors such as Terremark, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, etc. offering some form of cloud computing. But what do they really offer? Can any agency just move their email or applications “into the cloud?”
Let’s start with a definition… What types of Cloud Computing are there? Cloud computing breaks down into one of 3 areas:
- Infrastructure as a Service: This is the traditional Managed Server Providers like Rackspace that provides their server to a customer on a monthly or yearly basis. Infrastructure such as power, data networking, and cooling are offloaded to them, and applications and operating system are the customer’s responsibility.
- Platform as a Service: This is a model that vendors such as Google Apps and Amazon operate in. The vendor provides a “platform,” whether that’s email services, web, or storage hosting. This pulls the management of the underlying application and operating system to the vendor from the customer. This allows the customer to quickly add capacity if needed on demand.
- Software as a Service: These are the ASPs (application service providers) such as SalesForce.com, Oracle CRM on Demand, and Remedy on Demand. The ASP hosts all aspects of the application and platform, and provides access in a multi-tenant environment that is shared across all their customers.
- Any costs required to re-write an application to make it aware of the underlying platform. If you choose to utilize the Amazon S3 storage service for example, the application has to be made aware of the API that is provided and the storage and retrieval methods. Any costs required to rewrite the application to make it multi-instance aware are also not included.
- Monitoring uptime of the application. Just because the application is in the cloud, doesn’t make it have 100% uptime. Applications need to be monitored just like any internal application. This is where monitoring platforms such as Altiris Monitor Solution, Solarwinds Orion, and Quest Spotlight come in to ensure the availability of the applications.
- Security. Just because you aren’t managing the underlying platform in the PaaS or SaaS methods, doesn’t mean that the system will never be infected by a virus or malware. Writing layers of security into your application will ensure that it will be free of any malicious code or exploits.
- Sending private data into the “cloud.” Sending applications to the cloud now means that some of your agency’s data will be outside the walls of your data center. Carefully selecting what applications to move will ensure that only the minimum amount of data is required to be external to the agency.
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