Dear Team,
It gives me great pleasure to start this new edition of Insiders Power up series, which is created with two major purpose i.e. A. To educate the Corporate relation team on the latest industry trends & its effect on recruitment . B To en-courage writing and researching within the team.
The focus in this edition is the most discussed topic in the IT industry today “Cloud Computing”.
India will not only see a surge in consumption of cloud services driving growth in domestic IT usage but companies allover India will look to India to support their transition to cloud computing.
The Zinnov Study estimates the global cloud computing market to be over $70 Billion by 2015, India with its powerful ecosystem of over 1300 independent software vendors (ISV’s), 1.4 million developers and more than 11,000 system integrators ( SI & software development organizations) is ideally poised to address this opportunity . As a result an additional 300,000 jobs related to cloud services are estimated to be created in India over the next 5- 7 years.
It is very important for each one of us to know more about what cloud computing is all about as it is going to impact every industry in the years to come .
The following is a interesting article contributed by Ramaadevi gives you a detailed insight about the past present and future of Cloud Computing.
Cheers !
Anil S Kumar
Head – Corporate Relations
Team CAS
Everyone from the technology world to the business world is talking about Cloud Computing…here is my little effort in clearing the clouds on Cloud Computing!!!
Regards,
Ramaa
What is Cloud Computing ?
Cloud computing is an Internet (cloud) based development and use of computer technology (computing). The term cloud is used as a metaphor for the Internet, based on the cloud drawing used to depict the internet in computer network diagrams as an abstraction of the underlying infrastructure it represents. Typical cloud com-puting providers deliver common business applications online which are accessed from a web browser, while the software and data are stored on servers.
A cloud service has three distinct characteristics that differentiate it from traditional hosting:
1. It is sold on demand, typically by the minute or the hour
2. It is elastic -- a user can have as much or as little of a service as they want at any given time
3. The service is fully managed by the provider (the consumer needs nothing but a personal computer and Internet access).
Demystifying Clouds
Public or Private Clouds:
A Public Cloud sells services to anyone on the Internet. Currently, Amazon Web Services is the largest public cloud provider. IBM's Blue Cloud, Sun Cloud, Google AppEngine and Windows Azure Services Platform are other mentionable public clouds.
A Private Cloud is a proprietary network or a data center that supplies hosted services to a limited number of people. It is designed to appeal to an organization that needs or wants more control over their data than they can get by using a third-party hosted service such as Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) or Simple Storage Service (S3).
Cloud Computing Models
Infrastructure-as-a-Service like Amazon Web Services provides virtual server instances with unique IP ad-dresses and blocks of storage on demand. Customers use the provider's application program interface (API) to start, stop, access and configure their virtual servers and storage. In the enterprise, cloud computing allows a company to pay for only as much capacity as is needed, and bring more online as soon as required. Because this pay-for-what-you-use model resembles the way electricity, fuel and water are consumed, it's sometimes re-ferred to as utility computing.
Platform-as-a-service in the cloud is defined as a set of software and product development tools hosted on the provider's infrastructure. Developers create applications on the provider's platform over the Internet. PaaS pro-viders may use APIs, website portals or gateway software installed on the customer's computer. Force.com, (an outgrowth of Salesforce.com) and GoogleApps are examples of PaaS.
In the software-as-a-service cloud model, the vendor supplies the hardware infrastructure, the software product and interacts with the user through a front-end portal. SaaS is a very broad market. Services can be anything from Web-based email to inventory control and database processing. Because the service provider hosts both the application and the data, the end user is free to use the service from anywhere.
The Past
According to Chris O’Malley, Executive Vice President of CA’s Cloud Products and Solutions Business line "The combination of a worldwide recession, and a hyper-competitive global economy, shook up just about every company in every market." The catalyst for cloud adoption resulted from the fact that IT budgets were being intensely squeezed—while the need of the business for technology innovation continued to grow."
All employees in an organization need the right hardware and software they need to do their jobs. Buying com-puters for everyone isn't enough – one also has to purchase software or software licenses to give employees the tools they require. Traditional business applications—like those from SAP, Microsoft, and Oracle—have al-ways been too complicated and expensive. Also, they need a data center with office space, power, cooling, band-width, networks, servers, and storage. A complicated software stack. And a team of experts to install, configure, and run them. They need development, testing, staging, production, and failover environments.
When you multiply these headaches across dozens or hundreds of apps, it’s easy to see why the biggest compa-nies with the best IT departments aren’t getting the apps they need. Small businesses don’t stand a chance.
Instead of installing a suite of software for each computer, the organization has to load one application. That application would allow workers to log into a Web-based service which hosts all the programs the user would need for his or her job. Remote machines owned by another company would run everything from e-mail to word processing to complex data analysis programs. It's called cloud computing.
The Present
Many companies both big and small are seriously considering, if not subscribing, to cloud services. Some of the companies researching cloud computing are big names in the computer industry. Microsoft, IBM and Google are investing millions of dollars into research.
Advantages
Proven Web-services integration.
World-class service delivery.
No hardware or software to install
Faster and lower-risk deployment.
Empowered business users.
Automatic upgrades that don’t impact IT resources.
Concerns
Perhaps the biggest concerns about cloud computing are security and privacy. The idea of handing over important data to another company worries some people. The counterargument to this position is that the companies offering cloud computing services live and die by their reputations. It benefits these companies to have reliable security measures in place. Otherwise, the service would lose all its clients. It's in their interest to employ the most advanced techniques to protect their clients' data.
Privacy is another matter. If a client can log in from any location to access data and applications, it's possible the client's privacy could be compromised. Cloud computing companies will need to find ways to protect client privacy.
The Future
In the future, more cloud will come into picture, this year alone many big organizations moved into cloud ser-vice. Already the cloud business have grown by over 200%. Large vendors see this as the growing model for soft-ware and services in the future.
The number of mobile applications is growing sharply. However, limited processing power, battery life and data storage of mobile phone limit the growth of application software for mobile industry. The adoption of cloud com-puting is going to make mobile apps more sophisticated and they are going to be available for broader audience of subscribers.
Startups and enterprise will realize that the physical layer of the platform they are using for application middle-ware is not a part of the cloud as of yet. The usability of the cloud’s utility model (pay-per-use) cannot be taken advantage of without application platform. That's why a new generation of application servers, such as GigaS-paces XAP and Appistry will grow for the cloud users.
Lower costs of application deployment, attractive return of investment and quick payback of development cost is going to make the choice of cloud computing very lucrative down the road for both entrepreneurs as well as developers.
Due the economic downturn, many organization will try to reduce the operating cost. They will move towards lightweight client machines running free and open-source operating systems and applications. Simultaneously, the major chunk of the computing process will run on cloud.
Major vendors like Amazon, Google, CA, Microsoft and IBM already provide cloud services. In future, other big enterprise like Citrix, Sun, HP, Cisco, Intuit, Symantec and Yahoo will also expand the cloud services.
Developers from India, China or Brazil will see growing business in their home market and focus on high value application for overseas market rather than offering low-cost intensive labor.
Impact on Big Organizations
The economics of cloud computing lets innovative companies create products that either weren’t possible before or are significantly less expensive than the competition (or just more profitable.) Every improvement in storage, processing power, or technology enables innovations that weren’t possible before and cloud computing makes these opportunities unusually accessible. Smart companies will take notice.
Cloud providers such as Amazon, Microsoft Corp. and Google Inc. aim to persuade other firms to give up building
and managing their own data centers and to use their computer capacity instead.
Led by Amazon, most cloud services have largely been aimed at start-ups, such as the legion of Facebook and
iPhone applications developers.
Almost every big company is cautiously testing the waters these days. 3M, the St Paul, Minnesota, conglomerate,
is using Microsoft’s new Azure cloud service to allow thousands of advertisers to tap into a service that mathe-matically analyses promotional images and evaluates how visually effective they are likely to be. "It took a lot of the risk out of whether to commercialize it or not," said Jim Graham, a technical manager at 3M.
Impact on ISB
Students, Staff, Professors and Researchers would be able to access data from anywhere at any time. They could access the cloud computing system using any computer linked to the internet. Data wouldn't be confined to a hard drive on one user's computer or even ISB’s internal network.
Often, Professors and researchers work with calculations so complex that it would take years for individual computers to complete them. On a grid computing system, one could send the calculation to the cloud for proc-essing. The cloud system would tap into the processing power of all available computers on the back end, sig-nificantly speeding up the calculation.
It could bring hardware costs down. Cloud computing systems would reduce the need for advanced hardware. We wouldn't need to buy the fastest computer with the most memory because the cloud system would take care of those needs for us.
ISB doesn’t have to buy a set of software or software licenses for every employee. Instead, the company could pay a metered fee to a cloud computing company.
Servers and digital storage devices take up space. Cloud computing gives the option of storing data on someone else's hardware, removing the need for physical space on the front end.
ISB might save money on IT support. Streamlined hardware would, in theory, have fewer problems than a net-work of heterogeneous machines and operating systems.
Impact on CAS
The growing importance of cloud computing in the next decade is set to have a knock-on effect on the re-cruitment industry. According to the Recruitment and Employment Confederation's (REC) Technology 2020 report, cloud computing will be one of the ways in which recruiting and outsourcing will be changed in the next few years. Cloud Recruitment Jumps by 233% in January 2010.
When Infrastructure and software costs decreases, business expands paving for recruitments.
If companies switch to using streamlined computer systems, they'll have fewer IT needs. Some industry ex-perts believe that the need for IT jobs will migrate to the back end of the cloud computing system.
Cloud computing leaders have noticed the dearth of talent and have taken action. In late 2007, Google and IBM, followed by Yahoo, undertook initiatives to introduce web-scale computing to leading technology universities.
A new genre of small IT companies can be expected. With lower costs in setting up software companies, one can foresee an increase in entrepreneurial venture.
Conclusion
Cloud computing is the next big wave in computing. Cloud computing is quickly beginning to shape up as one of the major changes in the IT industry and there are hundreds of thousands of business customers of cloud offerings already. Cloud Computing is here to stay.
