10. Conclusion

Cloud computing has been one of the most innovative and disruptive technologies for business to come along in the last two decades.

The benefits to businesses are undeniable, cost savings, competitive advantage, collaboration to name a few, but so is the harm this technology can cause.

Take the case of UberX, a strart-up success story, unless you happen to be a cab driver. If you are a cab driver, you are now fighting to try to adapt your business model so you can remain competitive and successful. You are fighting for the right to continue your livelihood.

In the case of AirBnB - Alexandra Pelosi directed a compelling HBO documentary "San Francisco 2.0" regarding the socioeconomic effects of Tech startups such as AirBnB on the city of San Francisco. She gathers various interviews that would seem to indicate that natives of San Francisco are no longer welcome there. Indeed the real estate market is in shambles, but problems are further reaching and run much deeper.

Keith Uhlich wrote an interesting review on the documentary.

He describes it as:

"A short HBO documentary barely scratches the surface of the pernicious influences undermining the City by the Bay."

One point that definitely stands out is that by leveraging the power and flexibility of Cloud Computing, businesses are saving money and becoming more profitable. 

An unfortunate casualty is the people. Their jobs are sometimes eliminated due to the lack of demand for skilled technical staff to run infrastructure. The Cab and Hospitality industries as previously mentioned. 

The affordability and availability of housing as in the documentary.

Perhaps we do not yet know what all of the ill effects of Cloud computing will yet be. As with any technology it will continue to evolve.

I would challenge just about anyone to demonstrate Cloud Computing is not impacting their lives in some way, whether positively or negatively.

9. Small business, and Start-ups

I believe the demographic with the greatest to gain by leveraging cloud computing in business are start-ups.

Generally speaking, start-ups won't exactly have a lot of cash flow. With the power of Cloud computing, they can go from an idea to reality in a matter of days with very little cash investment.

I've seen a number of non-traditional businesses crop up in recent years that have become highly disruptive to traditional business. None of which would exist without Cloud Computing.

For Example:

• AirBnB - These folks have created a new business that is essentially turning property into short and long term rental property. This is proving disruptive for the Hospitality Industry as well as the traditional rental real estate market.

• UberX - Perhaps one of the best known disruptors. Virtually every country, City, or state, Uber operates in, they are quickly creating conflict with local taxi services, and in fact forcing government to rethink their laws.

• Alibaba - The World's greatest internet Bazaar essentially come out of nowhere and dominated the internet retailing industry seemingly overnight.

What all of these companies have in common is they are began as tiny start-ups. No staff, no infrastructure. Just an idea and some skill to create the coded framework, and a little help from the cloud.

8. What are the Different Types of Clouds?

There are currently 3 distinct models of cloud computing that each carry with them their advantages and disadvantages.


Public Cloud - Companies such as Amazon, Microsoft, Rackspace are examples of Public cloud.

• The pro for adopting public cloud services is no up-front costs, minimal monthly costs, high quality of service, and seamless integration for end users.
• The biggest con would be security. Companies with highly sensitive information would rather not expose that information to a public service, even though the provider may be trustworthy.

Private Cloud - Companies choosing to go the way of the private cloud have to build the cloud for themselves. This makes sense for large multinational organizations that may require the peace of mind of know their data, and applications are never stored or held outside of the organization.

• The only real pro here is security. If you trust your staff today, you are simply going to continue to trust them that they will not compromise your data's security, and integrity.
• Con - extraordinarily expensive. Imagine the laundry list within the recipe for BuyIT.com multiplied many times over. This is mainly the approach for an organization that already has significant infrastructure, but is going to try to realize some of the benefits of SaaS running out of their own Infrastructure.

Hybrid Cloud - As you might imagine, this options is a mix of both the former and the latter options. Companies like Redhat and VMware are leading the market in solutions to tie together public and private cloud offerings in seamless fashion.

• The pro is to realize some of the cost savings benefits of SaaS over the public cloud. While choosing which data or applications are so sensitive that you need to keep them in house.

7. The SPI Model of Cloud Computing

Modern Cloud services generally fit one or more of the three layers of the SPI model.

SaaS - Is all about delivering applications to the end user seamlessly. An example was the BuyIT.com Office 365 roll out of email. Other, more easily recognizable examples of SaaS would be the social media engines such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.

PaaS - Is about providing a development and deployment platform on which software developers can build feature rich applications that will eventually be consumed via SaaS as well as traditional means.

IaaS - Are the building blocks for all cloud computing. Companies such as VMware, Redhat, and others have built platforms that enable the abstraction of Networking, Hardware, and software resources. This is mainly consumed by System Admins looking to implement cloud solutions within the business. For example, bringing IaaS together to deploy PaaS to their software developers.

6. Evolution

Enterprise Cloud Computing is now a mature, stable, and cost effective option that was not necessarily available to to businesses in decades past.

In fact in the past 15 years or so, we I've seen companies demonstrate incredible vision, as they have brought new services to market. These new services have had a profound impact on the cloud as we know it today.

Companies such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and VMware,  have been some of the most significant pioneers in the world of cloud computing.

Key Milestones:

• 1998 - VMware, a Pioneer in Virtualization; a key building block in enabling cloud computing for almost 2 decades.
• 2002 - Amazon Web Services (AWS,) is launched which provided a vast array of cloud based Infrastructure Services.
• 2006 - Amazon (EC2) Elastic Computing Cloud is launched as a commercial services that enables companies and individuals to rent resources on which to run their applications.
• 2009 - Google, Microsoft, and others begin to offer browser based applications such as Office 365, and Google Apps.

5. Hope for BuyIT.com; Cloud To The Rescue.

BuyIT.com's problem sounded complicated to resolve. Indeed using traditional methods it was going to be an expensive endeavor to say the least.

Luckily, Cloud Computing has mature solutions to their problems.

BuyIT.com, can contact Microsoft (O365), or Google (Apps), and purchase Enterprise email for their staff at the marginal cost of approximately 10$ per user per month, or $100 per user per year.

The only things they are going to need in order to start sending emails are a domain name (www.buyit.com), the PC's they already possess, and an internet connection at their offices which they also already possess.

• No Construction, 
• No laundry list of hardware of software to purchase. 
• No long list of technical staff to recruit and employ.
• No Capital expenditure of any kind.
• Technical support is provided on a 24/7/365 basis by Microsoft.
• No need to worry about backups.
• No need to establish redundancy offsite for disaster recovery.
• No need to worry about security.

I've got to tell you, that sounds simple and inexpensive to me. 

One call to Microsoft and you can be up and running within minutes, not days, weeks, or months.

Unlimited Scale-Ability, simply log into the website and purchase more users.

No further need to worry about patches and upgrades. With these types of SaaS services, those will always be the responsibility of the provider and seamless to the end users.

Sounds like a pretty compelling argument to leverage Cloud Computing in some business situations.

4. I Love Frank The Dog But What About My Business?

Good question,

How can business leverage the power of the cloud? What are some pros and cons of adopting cloud computing in business.

To answer, I would like to lay out an example based on my fictional company, BuyIT.com and their quest for enterprise email service.

Traditionally, an organization looking to establish enterprise email services would generally follow the recipe below.

1. Build a data center or computer room with which to house Enterprise computing equipment.  
2. Purchase dedicated server hardware, and Storage hardware to live in the data center.
3. Acquire in appropriate Environmental cooling; servers don't like heat we need to run the room fairly cold.
4. Develop a power strategy that includes some form of backup power so that the servers don't go down whenever the power does.
5. Design your networks, Acquire the hardware, and tie everything in.
6. Secure the environment; Bio metrics, Camera's, Access cards, Security.
7. Implement some form of backup to ensure you can recover in the event of failure.
8. Do all of the above in a second location, so that you have redundancy in case of disaster such as earth quakes, floods, fire.
9. Purchase some type of Email server software such as MS Exchange, Lotus Domino, or a variety of other email servers available on the market.
10. Software Licensing for each and every user.

So far that recipe is looking pretty expensive. even a small implementation could run into the tens of millions of dollars!

Now let's talk about staff.

At a minimum, you are going to need highly trained professionals to operate and support:

1. The Data center Facilities 
2. The Server Hardware
3. The Storage Hardware
4. The Networks
5. The Computing Platform itself (Windows, Linux, Etc.)
6. The applications themselves (Exchange, Domino, Sendmail)
7. Security
8. Compliance

That's quite a diverse array of skills. Staffing your data center, and operating your own mail server is going to require a significant up front (CAPEX,) Capital investment just to get off the ground, not to mention the ongoing cost of all of those salaries.

The lay of the land looks quite bleak if you are a start-up, or a small business that can't afford to make a multimillion dollar investment just to establish email.

Even if a BuyIT.com has managed to follow the recipe and put forth the investment now they will also begin to see some residual costs annually based on renewing support for their licenses. Not to mention growth. Every time they grow, it's going to cost them.

The best designed computing environments have limits to how well they scale; normally referred to as scale ability. 

That is to say that no matter how well you plan, a thriving business will always outgrow the original computing capability. 

That means periodically going back to the drawing board to upgrade, redesign, overhaul, just so you can add capacity.

Not to fear, there is hope for BuyIT.com.

3. Where Did The Idea For Cloud Computing Come From?

It might surprise you to know that the concept or idea behind cloud computing has been around for many years.

In fact there have been "Clouds" since the sixties.

Here are some examples:

• Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) - Was established in 1969 and largely driven by J.C.R. Licklider. One of the earliest examples of cloud computing.
• Military Network (MILNET) - Was established in 1983 as a split off from ARPANET, was meant to provide service to military only, for declassified information.
• National Science Foundation Network (NSFNET) - Was established in 1985 to promote advanced research and educational networking.
• The Internet - Arguably the most well-know example of cloud computing. Replaced it's three predecessors.

These days just about everyone has heard of the internet, and many people have used it. 

2. What is Cloud Computing Anyway?

Wikipedia defines cloud computing as follows: 
"Cloud computing is a type of Internet-based computing that provides shared computer processing resources and data to computers and other devices on demand. It is a model for enabling ubiquitous, on-demand access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., computer networks, servers, storage, applications and services),^[1][2] which can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort. Cloud computing and storage solutions provide users and enterprises with various capabilities to store and process their data in third-party data centers^[3] that may be located far from the user–ranging in distance from across a city to across the world."

To summarize, cloud computing is computing, using a network of remote computing resources to store, manage, and process data, rather than a local server or a personal computer.

Your PC provides minimal computing power, but the applications themselves, are run from a remote location usually provided by a Cloud service provider. 

Exactly where doesn’t matter, it Is provided to you on demand, seamlessly so that you the end user is unaware of the manner by which it is being delivered to you.

It’s like a flipping a light switch and having your lights turn on at home. The electricity is being provided by your Hydro Company.

Where they obtain the electricity, or how they deliver it to you is irrelevant as long as your light turns on.

Still confused?

In my internet travels I've been inundated by blogs, articles, videos, charts and diagrams explaining just about every aspect imaginable of cloud computing; all with varying degrees of success.

The video below, created by Mihai Tanase, and uploaded to YouTube, is one of my favorites. 

It uses some humor to explain things in terms anyone can understand. This explanation helps people to relate to how they use cloud computing personally. One of the more effective presentations I have seen.

.

1. Introduction

Hello, my name is Tony Aleluia and I would like to welcome you to my presentation on Cloud computing. Before I get started I wanted to tell you a little about myself.

For the past 20 years, I have had the privilege to have worked in all levels of IT. From entry level positions supporting desktop hardware, to server support, networking, security, architecture and design as well as consulting. 

I've spent the past decade as an technology decision maker, most recently at the executive level.

Cloud computing is an exciting technology for recovering computer geeks such as myself.
I’ve watched this technology and related technologies grow in maturity and adoption.

With my previous employer, we were considered early adopters of the underlying technology. 

I’ve personally been involved in building public, private, and hybrid clouds.
It’s been an exciting ride, and I would like to share some of my insights with you all.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of anyone other than the author.