Tag Archive for 'cloud services'

2010 – the year of cloud computing catastrophes?

By Olafur Ingthorsson on January 3, 2010 in Cloud Computing. 8 Comments

As more companies offer cloud computing services and the number of users increase, statistics tell us that the likelihood of a serious problem occurring, for example, somewhere in the  transfer network or in different security segments, increases. We have already seen some serious ‘outages’ in the past, such at Magnolia, the social bookmarking site that crashed and lost all its data earlier this year. Will 2010 be the year of some disastrous encounters for cloud computing?

Some analysts are predicting 2010 to be the year of catastrophes for cloud computing, including the CEO of Strategic News Service, Mark Anderson, in an interview with BusinessWeek. He believes that the increasing reliability toward cloud services could actually backfire in the form of a serious service outage or security based catastrophe. And, the disaster could be big enough to question the dependability of cloud services by corporations in particular.

My believe it that although we might possibly see some serious outages or security breaches encounter, the long-term benefit of network delivered services will outweigh the risks of organisations continue to deploy and migrate to cloud based services. Clearly, organisations and IT managers must carefully select the right type of resources or applications to transfer to the cloud with regard to their mission-critical nature and sensitivity. If using a public cloud provider seems too risky in terms of security or availability, another option would be to migrate to a private (or hybrid) cloud.

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Cloud computing characteristics

By Olafur Ingthorsson on December 30, 2009 in Cloud Computing. 1 Comment

There is a great deal of ambiguity around cloud computing and no agreed definition still exists, although many have provided their Cloud computing question markown understanding of cloud based services and technologies.  A recent, and very readable, webtutorial report (Nov. 2009) called “A Guide For Understanding Cloud Computing” by Dr. Jim Metzler makes a clear attempt to define the  characteristics of cloud computing and its boundaries. Firstly, it answers the question of cloud computing primary objective as “to make a dramatic improvement in the cost effective elastic provisioning of IT services”. Secondly, it identifies eleven (or twelve) primary characteristics of a cloud computing solution:

  • Centralization – applications, servers, storage
  • Virtualization – including servers, storage, networks, desktops, etc
  • Automation – provisioning, troubleshooting, configuration
  • Dynamic movement of resources – such as virtual machines and storage
  • Internet reliance – extensive use of the internet for deployment and service provisioning
  • Self-service – users can select, configure and modify resources and services themselves online
  • Pay-as-you-go – user pay for consuming the service, no or minimum up-front fees
  • Simplification – fewer versions running, less IT resource complexity for organizations
  • Standardization – users gain access to standardized applications and hardware resources, fewer vendors
  • Technology convergence – enabling convergence of multiple technologies such as servers, networks, storage, etc.
  • Federation through standardization – with standardization comes the federation of disparate cloud computing infrastructures
This is an interesting list that provide a comprehensive picture of what characterizes cloud computing. Some of the characteristics are obviously more developed than others. Centralization and virtualization, for example, are already becoming mature and established technologies for enabling economical cloud computing services, while standards are largely still missing and federation of cloud computing infrastructures is still somewhat further ahead and is, of course, strongly linked to and dependent upon available standards. Still it’s a good idea to keep these in mind when you need to identify whether a service is cloud computing, or not.

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