The Data Center: Enterprises Following Consumers Into the Cloud

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The Data Center: Enterprises Following Consumers Into the Cloud
By John Rath

June 1, 2008 —

I touched on a number of aspects of cloud computing and the potential directions it could go in my last column. I’m still really intrigued by the cloud computing model and want to explore security and different ways that it can, and is already, being used today. I’ll try not to let my definition of cloud computing stray too far.

From a consumer standpoint, we have been moving to the cloud service model for some time. Where I used to have a physical tape in a machine at my house to record voicemail, it is now provided as a service, electronically, in my carrier’s infrastructure. I used to record TV shows to VHS tapes; now they are stored electronically on my DVR. Even this, though, is an intermediary, as I will most likely stream most any show I want from the cloud in the future.

I have hundreds of music CDs in my collection, but now I primarily listen to Pandora.com where I can customize an Internet radio station to my tastes. Where data backups were previously on CDs or DVDs and kept at home, I now back up to the storage cloud. I have piles and piles of pictures that I took with old cameras, and now they can be stored in the cloud by a service provider. Personal banking and paying bills used to mean a checkbook register and lots of envelopes and stamps, and now it’s done in the cloud as a service. There are a multitude of applications that used to run on your PC that are now in the cloud, including word processing, spreadsheets, graphics programs and games.

I realize that many of these examples are better described as software-as-a-service, but the idea is that you don’t ever really know where your data is physically stored; you never see it or necessarily care how it is stored, delivered, run or maintained, because that is the responsibility of the cloud provider. The data or applications could be running from South Carolina, Oregon, Iowa or across the globe for all you know.

The enterprise is a much tougher sell as there are regulations, greater security concerns, service level agreements and higher expectations. The pitch to enterprises in buying into cloud computing is similar to the consumer market, though.

Take equipment or software that previously ran inside of the corporate data center and move it into the cloud. For some businesses, the entire office can be delivered in the cloud from places like Zoho.com or 37 Signals, which offer productivity, collaboration, business and utility applications. Cloud services are very attractive to the SMB market, as it allows them to access an exponentially larger infrastructure than what they could afford while taking advantage of the pay-as-you-go model economically.

Watching what network carriers and equipment manufacturers are doing is a further indication of things to come in cloud computing. A short while back, Cisco purchased Sguil, an open-source security monitoring project. As Cisco continues to embed features like what Sguil offers into their carrier-grade products, it allows those features to be run in the cloud instead of inside the corporate data center. By this, I mean that it is a way for the cloud service provider to run the same services that an enterprise customer does on its own equipment in a virtualized network and security layer on massively scaled infrastructure. Another indicator that enterprise equipment is moving out of the corporate data center is the proliferation of dark fiber purchases and wide area networking equipment.

An exciting market to watch is the race to virtualize the corporate desktop. Citrix, Microsoft, VMware and others have made a lot of advances in taking us back to the green-screen days of dumb terminals, where your PC is moved into the cloud. The PC becomes important, not for what it can do, but for what it is able to connect to.

Google and IBM are building their own enterprise cloud to offer such things as advanced engineering applications, which, today, typically require expensive equipment that must be maintained and updated by the business. Google and IBM have the infrastructure to deliver such a thing and the resources to make it an attractive pay-as-you-go cloud service.

So cloud computing is a delivery model, a paradigm shift and an overall good thing for the data center industry. For many, it provides peace of mind to not have to manage and worry about all of the hassles that go along with information technology and running a data center. For others, it is an economic model that gives the advantage of disguising the true size of your business. Now, how does all of this affect staffing models in the IT department? More on that in the next column.

John Rath is an independent consultant and blogger at Datacenterlinks.com. He can be reached at johnsr4@gmail.com.

Related Search Term(s): Cloud computing, virtualization, Cisco, Google, IBM

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