Before You Move to Cloud Computing

There is considerable interest amongst organizations to move their apps to

the Cloud. But, like any new trend or technology, there are lots of doubts and

questions in everyone's mind. We've attempted to clear those doubts with the

help of this story, in which we've given a mix of both theory and practice.

Before you dive into the story, here are a few things that you must know about

Cloud Computing:

There's more to Cloud Computing than a few Internet based services



Cloud Computing is more than a few applications you can access over the

Internet. It allows you to buy hardware resources online, take an entire

platform for software development, or setup a platform yourself inhouse.

Cloud Computing is a fundamental shift from how your current IT

infrastructure is configured



Most of the time, when people talk about cloud computing, they refer to the

public cloud and some apps you can use from it. But there's a lot more to cloud

computing than procuring a few online services. It's a fundamental shift from

the traditional client/server architecture. Instead of having multiple servers,

and even clients, all over the place, they're all consolidated into fewer,

powerful machines. That's going back to the mainframe days, you might say, but

back in those days, you didn't have mobile users carrying laptops, netbooks, and

smartphones, with Internet access. So Cloud Computing is how your IT

infrastructure will change in the near future, to become more flexible, agile,

efficient, cost effective, and accessible from anywhere. This sort of tuning

will require careful planning, and would need to be done gradually in multiple

phases over a period of time.

Cloud computing is about reducing wastage of IT resources & utilizing them

more effectively



Whether it's the service provider's cloud, or your own, it's all about

utilizing your IT infrastructure more effectively. Most cloud applications are

built upon virtualization of hardware resources. While virtualization let's you

use the hardware more effectively, other tools let you do the allocation and

de-allocation of resources dynamically. Cloud computing to users is what

electricity is to consumers When you plug an electrical or electronic device

into a wall outlet, you expect the device to work. You're not concerned about

how electricity is generated at the back-end. This in a nutshell, is what cloud

computing is supposed to do to your IT infrastructure. Why should users have to

know the complexities of the IT infrastructure at the back-end? They should be

able to access the services seamlessly without any glitches.

Cloud computing does not equal the Cloud



While the cloud is typically another name for the Internet, cloud computing

is goes much beyond that and defines your IT infrastructure. There are three

models of cloud computing-public, private, and hybrid, and three different ways

of implementing them-SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS. All these have been explained

elsewhere in this story. If you do use the terms Cloud and Cloud Computing

interchangeably, then you have to be careful, to avoid confusing others. In this

story, we've covered everything you need to know before you decide to move to

the cloud. We've discussed the key trends and cloud computing adoption scenario

amongst Indian enterprises. We've explained the different cloud computing models

and modes of their implementation. We've talked about how to build your own

private cloud, we've discussed a few cloud computing examples. Key Trends in

Cloud Computing adoption amongst enterprises, and finally, we've carried a whole

table of the kinds of services available in a public cloud.