One of the most successful business people of our time, Apple’s late co-founder Steve Jobs, was one of the first to recognise the benefits of the "cloud", which put simply is a term used to describe a model of computing which enables on-demand network access to a shared pool of resource. When Jobs rejoined Apple in 1996, one of his first acts was to move all of the company’s data – including fiercely protected information about the business’s future plans – to Apple’s servers, rather than entrusting that valuable information to individual computers…
Flash forward to 2011 and Apple’s iCloud service is pushing the idea to customers that the cloud is an actual place where photos, documents, calendars and contacts can be stored. In fact there’s a unity of message from the three best-known names in technology, with Google also pushing the cloud through its five-year-old Google Docs offering, which lets users collaboratively edit documents from different devices, and Microsoft following up years of cloud talk with a serious commitment to pushing take-up of its cloud services.
While consumers might not need to understand how a Hotmail account is accessed through a smartphone, or why Facebook information is available on any device connected to the internet, the same delivery principle powers many of the most popular consumer web services. Many business solutions are also now delivered in the same way; however risky or radical it may once have seemed to store important company data on remote servers in the cloud.
The simple argument for businesses in favour of cloud computing is that buying expensive new servers is left to the cloud computing provider, which will also keep software updated and look after security.
Those are powerful plus points and cloud computing is now being considered in every corner of every business. For many startups, it’s their first resort: Twitter, Foursquare and dozens of others turned first to Amazon’s cloud computing service to store and process data because it meant they didn’t have to buy servers to store anything; they would just pay for the storage and bandwidth they used. That turns computing from a capital expense into an operating expense, with direct benefits for cashflow – key for a small business.
Andy Burton, chairman of the Cloud Industry Forum, an industry group, cites the case of LawWare, based in Edinburgh, which writes software for legal practices: it wanted to speed up implementation, and so turned to cloud providers so it could rapidly develop projects for customers. "The time taken to implement a new system went from weeks to hours," says Burton.
He says that the problem with the word "cloud" is that many people find it ambiguous: is it about flexibility, or speed, or cost? He argues that "it makes you a more competitive organisation" and that the key question to ask is which of those three is the most important to improve, and focus on how cloud systems can help.
In June 2009, just after Michael Jackson’s death, Twitter saw traffic peak at 456 tweets a second but, by August 2011, following news of Beyoncé’s pregnancy, it was generating 8,868 tweets a second. Flexible cloud-based servers meant that Twitter could handle that explosive growth – few companies could forecast and manage such expansion on internal systems.
Essential characteristics
But what is cloud computing? The US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) formally defines cloud computing as "a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources – networks, servers, storage, applications and services – that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction."
There are five essential characteristics: on-demand self-service, so you decide how much power you need; broad network access, so it’s available across the network; "resource pooling", so you don’t care where the computers storing the data are; "rapid elasticity", so that computing power available can ramp up as demand grows; and measured service, so that you’re only charged for what you use – which might be storage, bandwidth, processing, user accounts, or some combination of those.
The idea that cloud services will make a big difference to businesses has been a recurrent theme of technology discussions for the past 10 years or so. Certainly, UK businesses have indicated that they are ready to adopt cloud computing. A study in the first half of 2011, which polled IT and business decision-makers across the private and public sectors, found that almost half already use cloud services. The private sector leads the way, with those employing more than 20 people ahead of smaller businesses in adoption (52% v 38%) – even though the latter could gain more because of the lower capital spending cloud computing requires. The driver for adoption is overwhelmingly cited as flexibility, with only 16% citing cost savings, though that figure rockets up to 69% among those already using cloud services.
In the public sector, the UK Police crime maps use a combination of Amazon and Google Maps, while Transport for London (TfL) is a high-profile user of Microsoft’s Azure platform. TfL uses Azure to host its data feeds, which allows developers to create real-time travel information applications. Technology industry analysts Gartner says that by 2014 at least 10% of all businesses’ email services will be cloud-based and the tipping point to broad-scale adoption will have been reached.
It’s not just going to be about Hotmail any more. The cloud is coming, and the only question soon might be why your business isn’t on board.