What is cloud computing? A quick guide to the subject

There’s been plenty of talk about cloud computing ,widely being seen as the ‘next big thing’ in the IT world, but what’s it all about?

The fundamental idea behind the concept is to rent the provision of a service from another company, and for that service provision to be out on the Internet. Defining what we mean by “provision of service” is not easy, because different vendors mean different things. But the essential core idea is that you do not run central services inside your organisation, but push them out to these third party suppliers. Think of it as “outsourcing your servers” and you are mostly there.

It’s not a concept that’s entirely unknown to us. As consumers we’re used to all sorts of cloud services; email like Gmail and Hotmail, video sites like YouTube and social media companies like Facebook. None of the software for any of these companies resides on the consumer’s own devices but we’re all happy about using these services.

And services is the key word; a fundamental aspect of cloud computing is the move from talking about hardware and software to talking about services – it’s a big shift in the world of IT.

What type of services are provided? Well, at the simplest level, you might be renting server space, usually contained within a virtual machine environment. More likely though, you will be renting use of a service – an email server, a web engine, or an application hosting engine in which you can run your own custom applications.

Why would you want to do this? Well, there are several reasons. Firstly, there is a huge economy of scale at play here. A datacentre can provide access to computing power at a lower cost than you can provide it in-house. There is one large air-conditioning system, one big power supply, one set of security and so forth. Its simply economies of scale at play. But it goes further than that: if you are renting a certain number of seats worth of, for example, Exchange Server, then you don’t need to worry about making sure you have bought the right size server. Choose something too small, and it will struggle. Too big, and you have wasted money. In a per-seat rental environment, it’s not up to you to worry about the sizing. The costs are entirely predictable, with no surprises.

Even better, you usually can forget about having to worry about keeping the server patched and up to date. That’s down to the service provider to do, and this can take away a considerable headache and cost.  You will also benefit from the scalability of the cloud solution too – if you current internal server on which your email server dies, then you have to get a replacement up and running as soon as possible. But this could take days. In a cloud environment, your email server is running on one of maybe thousands of servers. If “your” hardware fails, your workload can be quickly moved to another box, and this happens automatically.

Finally, if you are running a system which has an unpredictable load pattern, for example an e-shop in the run up to Christmas, then you can have real problems scaling up the capabilities of a local server to cope with the unexpected (or even planned!) load. Worse still, the internet connection into your office might get swamped. With a cloud solution, not only will the datacentre have a huge amount of connectivity, but it might well be possible to add in more computing power for a few days to cope with the load. This is called scale-out, where you bolt on more horsepower for the days when you need it.

Of course, a cloud solution is not a universal panacea, and like any IT solution, it requires careful planning and implementation as well as requiring  a careful assessment of how it will change the load on your existing infrastructure. But a well-designed and implemented cloud solution can be a radical improvement to a company’s IT infrastructure, which is why there is such a high interest in the topic at present.

 Getting the best value for money out of the computing infrastructure has always been a target, especially now when budgets are tight – cloud computing offers one way forward.