Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
3.5.2.3 Utility Grid
A Grid that is owned and deployed by a third party service provider is called a
Utility Grid. The service being offered via a Utility Grid is utility computing, i.e.
compute capacity and/or storage in a pay-per-use manner. A Utility Grid operates
outside the firewall of the user (see fig. 3.4).
Fig. 3.4:
Utility Grid architecture
The user does not own the Utility Grid and does not have control over its operation.
This means that the user company has to transmit data and computing requests to
the Utility Grid and collect results also from it. Thus, by using Utility Grids, the
security and privacy risks as well as concerns regarding reliability are increasing.
This has strong impact on the decision whether to use a Utility Grid or not, or which
data to expose to the Utility Grid and which data to keep behind the firewall. On
the positive side, Utility Computing does not require upfront investment in IT infra-
structure and enables transformation of capital investment costs into variable costs.
Utility Computing furthermore provides scalability and flexibility of IT resources
on demand.
