Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
The survey revealed that in spite there is awareness for Cloud Computing in most
of the companies, there is no agreement yet what exactly the defining features of
Cloud Computing are. Despite of that according to the results of the survey it seems
that Cloud Computing is becoming widespread: 99% of the respondents claimed
that they are discussing or implementing Cloud Computing and 82% report that they
are in some stage of trial, implementation, or use of public clouds. According to the
report furthermore “
66 percent of respondents report they have a dedicated budget
for cloud. Additionally, 71 percent of respondents expect cloud computing to grow
in the next two years.
” (F5 Networks 2009). These are rather encouraging numbers
regarding Cloud Computing adoption, even though they have to be interpreted care-
fully. The summary report of the study available online does not mention which
Cloud Services (IaaS, PaaS or SaaS) are in use.
According to the report, major needs of companies driving the usage of Cloud
Computing are: the efficiency of IT (according to 71% of the respondents) and
reduction of capital costs and easing staffing issues (according to 68% of respond-
ents) (F5 Networks 2009).
Further clarification which companies are using public Clouds is provided by the
analysis of published case studies of Cloud providers. For example, at the case study
subpage of its Web Services Site (http://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/),
Amazon provides an overview of short case studies of companies using its Cloud
services. The majority of the customers presented there are rather young Internet
companies. Such Internet companies start on a green field and can build their infra-
structure from the beginning based on the Cloud Computing paradigm. Even more,
the availability of computing power on demands gives them the opportunity to start
and grow fast without investments in infrastructure. For traditional companies,
Cloud Computing proves to be more challenging. Only few traditional companies
are present on the Amazon case study list as for example The Washington Post
that uses the Amazon Web Services to turn online Hilary Clinton's White House
schedule during her husband's time in office, with more than 17'000 searchable
pages (see also The Economist 2008). Another example described by The Economist
(2008) is NASDAQ who uses the Amazon Web Services for providing its service
related to historical stock market information, called Market Replay. Both applica-
tions are not critical with respect to data security and privacy. Thus, it seems that
traditional companies are using Clouds only where no critical and sensitive data is
involved. Major concerns related to implementation of Cloud Computing besides
those mentioned in Chapter 4 are:
•
Security and privacy of data
as well as international regulation related to them
•
International and company regulation regarding data storage
- current Cloud
providers do not offer the possibility to monitor where the data is.
•
SLA agreements with Cloud providers
- currently available SLA agreement
involve generic terms in terms of availability, support and similar aspects, but
are not able to cover individual needs.
Overall, Cloud Computing seems to have a faster adoption than Grid Computing.
On the one hand this is due to the fact that, in particular Internet start-ups can build
