Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
• Many and scattered data centers with underutilization of their
resources
• Increasing maintenance costs of data centers
Business changes like globalization and mobility resulted in an increasing
number of distributed data centers. At present, prevailing practice is to opti-
mize each data center mostly independent of other data centers. This means
that each data center is designed to accommodate high peak demand for
computation power and data. As a result, there is an ever-increasing demand
for storage and computing power. For example, the volume of digital content
is constantly increasing. In 2007, the amount of information created exceeded
available storage capacity for the first time ever. This implies technological
challenges as well as challenges with regard to information governance for
businesses.
The increasing number of data centers resulted in a disproportionate
increase in their maintenance costs, in particular with respect to power
and cooling costs. Energy efficiency of IT is a concern that becomes increas-
ingly important. The continuously increasing amount of digital information
requires increasing computing power, bigger storage capacities, and more
powerful network infrastructure to transmit information. This ultimately
results in increasing carbon footprint of IT. By 2020, ICTs are estimated to
become among the biggest greenhouse gas emitters, accounting for around
3% of all emissions. Growth in the number and size of data centers is esti-
mated to be the fastest increasing contributor to greenhouse emissions.
Cloud computing has been among the first attempts to manage the high
number of computing nodes in distributed data centers and to achieve better
utilization of distributed and heterogeneous computing resources in com-
panies. Advances in virtualization technology enable greater decoupling
between physical computing resources and software applications and prom-
ise higher industry adoption of distributed computing concepts such as the
Cloud. The continuous increase of maintenance costs and demand for addi-
tional resources as well as for scalability and flexibility of resources is lead-
ing many companies to consider outsourcing their data centers to external
providers. Cloud computing has emerged as one of the enabling technolo-
gies that allow such external hosting efficiently.
It is important to consider that Cloud Computing is not only changing
the IT infrastructure in a company but has the potential to provide sig-
nificant business value. As mentioned earlier, increased agility, that is, an
enterprise's increased ability to respond and adjust quickly and efficiently
to external market stimuli, is considered a key success factor for compa-
nies today. Existing IT infrastructure is considered to be a major obstacle
to a company's agility. Prevailing IT infrastructure reflects the inflexible
built-to-order structure: thousands of application silos, each with its own
custom-configured hardware, and diverse and often incompatible assets
that greatly limit a company's flexibility and thus reduce time to market;
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