Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is the next stage in the Internet's evolution, providing the means by which everything — from computing power to computing infrastructure, applications, business processes and personal collaboration — can be delivered to you as a service, wherever and whenever you need it.

The emerging consensus is that cloud computing will play an increasing role in the IT operations of most companies over the coming years. This design will fundamentally change the delivery model for services.

Today’s trend in enterprise space is to optimize IT operations and/or outsource parts or the whole of IT to reduce maintenance costs and focus on the specific activities of the business. There is tremendous interest in cloud computing because of the flexibility and cost savings it delivers, by enabling IT organizations to increase capacity and add capabilities on the fly, without investing in new infrastructure or training personnel.

Cloud computing has four essential characteristics:

• elasticity and the ability to scale up and down
• self-service provisioning and automatic deprovisioning
• application programming interfaces (APIs)
• billing and metering of service usage in a pay-as-you-go model

To date, most of the attention has focused on moving server workloads to the cloud, which introduces significant complications, not least of which is security, since this requires moving sensitive corporate data to an external datacenter beyond your control.

The service that has been missing is DaaS (Desktop as a Service), which combines virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and cloud computing, delivering the best of both worlds. There is no need to build an infrastructure and no complexity: enterprise IT and end-users simply access a service provider's infrastructure, which already has the capacity and connectivity assets needed to support a high-performing DaaS environment.

DaaS transfers enterprise IT costs from a capital to an operating expense, and dramatically reduces the ongoing cost of desktops, since there's no longer any need to own or maintain the physical assets required to host virtual desktops.

When enterprises shift their desktop environments to the cloud, the desktop instances move, but the data and back-end systems are still hosted in the enterprise datacenter, to ensure security.

The service provider is responsible for everything up to the virtual machines (servers, storage, virtualization software), and the enterprise is responsible for everything inside the VMs (OS image/licensing, application packaging/licensing and user profiles). This structure allows IT to continue using the skill sets and best practices already employed for managing desktops in the physical world, including those for OS and application deployment, Active Directory, help desk and security policies.

In general, cloud computing customers do not own the physical infrastructure and therefore avoid capital expenditure by renting usage from a third-party provider. They consume resources as a service and pay only for resources that they use. Paying only for what they use, cloud computing users can avoid capital expenditures (CapEx) in three areas:

• hardware
• software
• services

Consumption is usually billed on a utility basis (resources consumed, like electricity) or subscription (time-based, like a newspaper), with little or no upfront cost.

Other benefits of this time-sharing approach:

• low barriers to entry
• shared infrastructure and costs
• low management overhead
• immediate access to a broad range of applications
• reliable disaster recovery (since the data is stored in multiple geographically dispersed datacenters, which provide for distributed backups)
• reduced power consumption