Cloud Services

“As companies modernize their enterprise networking infrastructure, driven by the need to remain competitive, and retain critical survival capabilities, such as, agility and flexibility in a fast changing marketplace, it is opportunities galore for technologies like cloud computing and virtualization, among others.  Simplicity in implementation and low costs are prime factors driving adoption of clouds by large and small enterprises alike.”

                                                                                      Global Industry Analysts Report April 2010

NEXT-GENERATION IT INFRASTRUCTURE

Although the term “cloud computing” is quite recent, elements of the concept have been around for years. For instance, timesharing and virtual machines date back to the mainframe era in the 1960s. The notion of “the network is the computer” was first coined by Sun Microsystems in 1982. Grid computing, in use by the scientific community since the early 1990s, has been widely deployed in financial services for the past five or six years, especially in securities and trading operations. Even the on-demand business model dates back to the late 1990s, when it was served up by organizations known as application service providers, or ASPs.

What makes cloud computing real now is the maturation of the Internet as an IT platform, virtualization, hardware commoditization, standardization, and open source software. A key catalyst is the success of major Internet companies like Google, Amazon and Microsoft. The highly global and scalable infrastructure these companies have built to power Internet search, electronic commerce, social networks, and other online services forms the core of the current cloud phenomenon

CLOUD COMPUTING – What Is It Really?

Cloud computing should be considered another important step forward in the continuing industrialization of IT and could thus play a future role in enabling high performance. The changing business model, underlying technologies and architecture will likely create a new wave of innovations. For enterprise IT users, the cloud holds great potential in delivering lower-cost services, greater IT agility, more flexibility and better user experiences. Business research identifies virtualization—a major enabler for the cloud—as a key contributor to high-performance IT.

The cloud also presents a number of new challenges in data security, privacy, control, compliance, application integration, and service quality. To be successful, companies should take small, incremental steps toward this new environment so they can reap early benefits for applicable business situations, and learn how to deal with the associated risks.

CAPSTONE – Let us Help You Find Your Way

Cloud computing is at an early stage, with an assortment of providers large and small delivering a slew of cloud-based services, from full-blown applications to storage services to spam filtering. 

There are many categories in the world of cloud computing that you can use to meet the needs of your enterprise architecture.  Some solve specific problems and they all have trade-offs.  Where do you begin?