Amid all of the headlines and hype that has surrounded Cloud Computing, or Cloud Services, over recent months, there is now some tangible, real world evidence that Cloud Computing will have a major role to play as the I.T. engine room for many small and medium size organisations.

The key questions many business people are asking is Why & How?

The Why?

The vast majority of business leaders agree that Information Technology is expensive to acquire, costly to maintain, often difficult to understand and typically entails taking on significant business and operational risk whilst implementing the new systems. It is therefore understandable that if there were a realistic alternative to the way that businesses procure technology, then they would be keen to explore it. Cloud Computing offers a real alternative for acquiring and using information technology.

The Rise of the Cloud Computing Provider

Reputable Cloud Computing providers will offer enterprise class hardware as standard that is highly available, fault tolerant and scalable which is often beyond the IT budgets of most organisations.

The enterprise hardware is usually located within a secure Data Centre environment, which delivers fault tolerant fabric services including redundant power systems, cooling, advanced security and environmental management systems. And, if the Provider has invested correctly in their cloud infrastructure, they will be confident in offering customers a Service Level Guarantee which commits them to delivering I.T. services to a contracted level.

The How?

Businesses no longer need to fund I.T. systems from business capital. Alternatively, the organisation can specify the amount of technology resources required and have them provisioned by the Cloud Provider in days rather than months. In most cases, the Cloud Provider can scale those resources both up and down dynamically to suit business demand. Customers only pay for the I.T. resources used or dedicated to them on a monthly basis. This operationally expensed, low risk deployment of I.T. systems is proving to be a particularly attractive proposition to Board members and the Finance Director in particular.

A Cloud Service provider will deliver all the necessary hardware maintenance, software licensing and storage requirements as part of the service and takes responsibility for the Data Centre fabric services including the electricity, cooling and environmental services. This removes the service provision challenge from the I.T department to ensure that high service uptimes are constantly delivered. In addition, Cloud Providers can often incorporate the necessary communications links and Internet bandwidth services, making the service easier to manage and budget for the customer.

Cloud Computing services are particularly well suited to organisations that have multiple offices, distributed infrastructures, large mobile or remote workforces or have constant project churn. Cloud is also the ideal choice for new business start-ups and organisations wanting to centralise I.T. resources.

A Cloud customer typically has a choice of two Cloud options:

Shared Cloud Services – where resources are multi-tenanted and are controlled centrally by the Cloud Provider e.g. web servers, hosted exchange or SharePoint sites. Shared services are usually “out of the box” and offer limited service customisation.

Dedicated Cloud Services - where the Cloud Provider delivers a set of resources e.g. servers, processors, memory, storage capacity and user connections that deliver the I.T. service to a guaranteed SLA to the customer. The organisations own internal I.T. department continues to support the business applications, technology resource allocation and end user support. The Cloud Provider presents the required technology for use by the business wrapped up and delivered to the SLA.

The Benefits

Cloud Computing delivers a capital cost free I.T. service with enterprise class hardware assets. An SLA backed service delivery with reduced business I.T. risk, lower long-term operational overheads and provides a more dynamic and scalable technology infrastructure for business.

By Martin Coleman
Managing Director - Knowledge I.T.