As I wander through the streets of Spain, I am ensuring that I am making use of my blackberry to the fullest extent – Chatting with people, Google mapping, Skype calls at the cheapest rate possible, booking tickets, booking my restaurants, storing information etc. – Amazing what it can do for me to move from one city to the other. Innovation is the key driver in Science and Technology, and it never stops at a particular point. Things which were not accessible ten years ago are just few minutes away from access. The Encyclopedia has given way to the Wikipedia. Yes, we are in the Flat World. Flat World is a concept coined by Thomas Friedman, who mentions about access to free information from anywhere in the world and at anytime. This concept has eventually given way to the next big wave in the IT sector – Cloud Computing.

A Cloud is nothing but a reference to the Internet. And the definition of Cloud Computing origins from the fact that technology is used to the fullest extent to manage the business and resources for computing purposes. The cloud is where that data and information are stored and the desktops and notebooks can gain access to these data and information, at any point in time and from any place in this world.
Global competition and business strategies have seen innovative models in this flat world. To be globally connected with your consumers or assume the target segments for your business, it becomes equally important for companies to maintain a transparent business and with huge data centre. Cloud Computing perfectly utilizes the Technology, People and Strategy model, and helps the consumers and customers access the data and information readily and at ease. From an organizational point of view, Cloud Computing will help the customers to control the costs, by improving the performance of the organizations business.

Large corporations and companies use Cloud Computing technologies to communicate with customers and business partners and to encourage collaboration within the company. A number of companies and businesses are looking to understand the working of Cloud Computing and the effects in their business. The costs or the ROI are much higher than the costs of purchasing, developing and maintaining traditional client-server application. According to IBM, cloud computing, or network-delivered services and software, can save customers up to 80% on floor space and 60% on power and cooling costs, and deliver triple asset utilization. Currently, all the big companies are pushing to introduce the concepts of Cloud Computing into the market. Gartner.com and McKinsey Quarterly reports have already stated that Cloud Computing would be the key driver of the business within next five to ten years.

One can find various lists of pros and cons of the concept, but the fact is Cloud Computing is shaping the way users work and interact with information on the Web by shifting focus to the information users. The rising popularity of online ― user-driven services like MySpace, Facebook, Wikipedia and YouTube has brought the Cloud Computing technology into picture. The underlying concept of this technology relies mainly on user collaboration – web services, p2p networking, blogging, podcast, online social networking sites etc. In the long-term, Cloud Computing will be the strategic delivery model for most of the firms and the one’s to benefit the most are the big corporations. Is your business ready for one?

Related article in ConsultingNetwork: http://consultingnetwork.co.in/did-mckinsey-get-it-wrong-mckinseys-cloud-computing-report-is-partly-cloudy/669/

Picture Source: http://www.economist.com/business/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10650607

Note: This excerpt of a detailed report  for a business venture that uses this technology is based on personal experience and market research in this area.

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• April 18, 2009 -- Did Mckinsey Get it Wrong ?? McKinsey’s Cloud Computing Report Is Partly Cloudy (0)

The report makes some thought-provoking points but neglects to address a few key trends that are occurring in cloud server services. Innovation is rapidly changing in the cloud. The space is still very much a work in progress and big cloud computing services, like AWS, Google, Sun Microsystems and Microsoft, are regularly coming out with different products. As these companies throw their hats into the “cloud computing ring,” AWS will face increased competition in the market and could cause prices to go down to fight for market share.

Amazon’s cloud computing services, in particular, are constantly evolving. What started out as pay-by-the-drink storage (S3) and computational processing (EC2), now includes a simple database (SimpleDB), a content delivery network (CloudFront), and computer-to-computer messaging (SQS). Most recently, Amazon added a web-scale data processing engine with Amazon Elastic MapReduce. (It is a framework for accessing data stored in file systems and databases). It allows developers leverage Amazon’s cloud computing power by creating applications which process huge reservoirs of data (conveniently stored in Amazon S3) in parallel.

The next generation of enterprise apps is already begun to be written with the cloud and virtualization both in mind. At that point, it doesn’t make much sense to do it all through conventional data centers, when you can optimize through other services and get the best of both worlds. And many large companies currently use cloud services for a segment of their data storage, and also utilize and virtualize in conventional data centers.

Microsoft recently announced Exchange 2010, a new suite of Microsoft Office-related products, are designed to be deployed and managed servers on-premises or from the cloud. Microsoft?s Azure OS, which is expected to be rolled out in the fall, can host these office-related products in the cloud. It’s not a huge stretch of the imagination to speculate that in the not to distant future, Microsoft will integrates the on-premise storage and Azure storage together, thus allowing companies to tap into both utilities in the same application.

The report seems to hype the cloud costs and understates the rapid changes in cloud market conditions and resultant innovation and price cutting that will take place in the near future.

Source: Washington Post

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