Building a new utility - By Tate Cantrell

Views and Opinions on Green IT (Apr 26 2010)

1. 

   I’ve thoroughly enjoyed watching the debate across the blogosphere as to the viability of private clouds and the strategy of utilizing large-scale public cloud infrastructures.  One of the most interesting corollaries to the conversation is the comparison of the cloud to a product that we all benefit from on a daily basis – the electrical utility.

   
   

   Let’s turn the tables on the analogy.  In truth, we can look at the electrical utility itself as a cloud service.  Cloud computing emerges now just as the early electrical utilities emerged with a new way to use energy – computational energy.  As with the factories and offices on the electrical cloud, the successful companies will look to the computing cloud for real world reliability.  Never before has computing been so available. 

   
   

   Real world reliability is achieved when business processes are honed to maximize the use of available commodities.  The opportunity to streamline processes and thereby benefit has encouraged CIO's to reevaluate how they deploy applications for their stakeholders. Instead of the classic approach of deploying applications within a monolithic environment that is designed to meet all requirements, the thought leaders are qualifying their applications based on business priority, interdependency, quality of service, latency sensitivities, storage requirements, and security considerations. Once qualified, each application can be deployed in an optimal combination of performance and total cost.

   
   

   Trending CIO's are choosing cloud environments to achieve this balance of performance and cost. While convention may drive enterprises to deploy clouds within a private fabric that is tightly controlled, there are certainly opportunities to move outside the box.  The providers of cloud computing services know that they must innovate to build products that meet the performance requirements of the enterprise applications.  As the public clouds standardize into commoditized platforms, the cloud providers will increase in quantity and the total costs to the enterprise will decrease through well known economic forces.  The margins that drive enterprises to innovate are never found in the commodities – they are found in new ideas and products.  Successful businesses will use public clouds to innovate and will reduce their cost to perform like never before. 

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