Cloud Computing Support for Construction Collaboration - Mobile and Pervasive Computing in Construction - page 239

Ensuring that everybody on a project is working from the same documentation, the
same plan and that any changes made are relayed to everyone concerned simul-
taneously is essential to ensure unnecessary drain on administrative and logistical
project resources. When the construction project team and client are co-located,
ensuring everybody has a copy of the relevant documentation in a timely fashion
becomes less of an arduous task, but this is rarely the case.
Various studies (Egan, 1998; Latham, 1994) on the practices and processes of the
UK construction industry have consistently pointed to the urgent need to address
the issues concerned with such a transient, multidisciplinary, virtual organization
and to seek solutions to these issues in modern Information and Communication
Technologies (ICTs) like the World Wide Web, concurrent engineering, distrib-
uted computing, and more latterly cloud-based technologies. Until recently,
concurrent engineering was investigated in seeking to address the issues mentioned
above (Prasad 1996; Anumba and Evbuomwan, 1997; Cutting-Decelle et al., 2007).
However, concurrent engineering relies on the existing distributed computing
technologies and fails to address some key requirements of such a solution. For
example, current Internet technologies address communication and information
exchange among computers but do not provide integrated approaches to the
coordinated use of resources at multiple sites for computation (Foster et al., 2001).
Technologies like CORBA predominantly focused upon resource sharing within a
single organization. Most distributed applications, such as project extranets, largely
implement centralized access to a core project database for the different project
actors (Wilkinson, 2005). This is where cloud-based (or web services-based)
solutions promise to offer a truly distributed computing solution by providing
secure remote access to, and the co-allocation of, multiple computers and data
resources.
12.2 What is cloud computing?
A cloud has long been used in network diagrams to represent a sort of black box
where the interfaces are well known but the internal routing and processing is not
visible to the network users (Rhoton, 2010). Specifically, a cloud symbol is often
used to represent the Internet in schematic diagrams. In fact, physical clouds in
the nature and cloud infrastructures in IT systems have many similar character-
istics. Physical clouds are huge, distant, and opaque. Similarly, cloud
infrastructures are often large datacenters, off premise, and like black boxes
from a users' perspectives. Physical clouds are different in color, shape, and
height. Similarly, cloud computing has different service models and deployment
models. In the following, cloud computing, its service delivery models, and its
deployment models are described.
There are various definitions of cloud computing. Leimeister et al. (2010)
defined cloud computing as “an IT deployment model, based on virtualization,
where resources, in terms of infrastructure, applications and data are deployed via the
internet as a distributed service by one or several service providers. These services are
scalable on demand and can be priced on a pay-per-use basis”.