Cloud Computing – Part I – Changing a Paradigm and Culture of Data Centers

Cloud Computing is another of the topics that are innovative, it is a lever to transform business and also correlates with the innovative themes as we have approached.

Starting from a simpler definition, to then evolve on how cloud computing has become more elaborate throughout its history, we can say that Cloud Computing is the use and delivery of external computing and storage resources—usually from specialized vendors. In this concept, the “Cloud” would extend from the access network to these resources, the resources themselves and the services provided related to these resources. Therefore, the cloud computing business has assumed several facades and complexities, since each use case was more or less complete according to the purpose. Let’s investigate this.

The term Cloud, of course, applies precisely because we understand that a cloud comprises a degree of external abstraction from functional or architectural diagrams, so common in IT and Telecom staffing. This external is opposed to resources that are more under direct control, and where there is a much more granularized management over each resource.

This abstraction has roots in the history of the internet, since we can remember that it was created in the academic world, precisely to be able to access an infrastructure and its information from anywhere, even in the 60’s.

Since then, the idea of offering services over the Internet has been improving, until near the turn of the century, Salesforce.com and soon after Amazon began offering services, processing and storage. The idea of flexibility or elasticity in the Cloud offering was already beginning to be explored. Even small businesses could get their resources and optimize their IT infrastructure spending with less risk. At the end of the last decade, we had the advent of Web 2.0, which then consolidated a relatively common way of delivering services in the Cloud, with applications based on collaboration and information sharing.

In a way, Cloud’s success can be explained as risk transfer, cost reduction, and a focus on the business, so more and more companies are choosing to be customers of a Cloud Services provider.

Risk transfer is because building, expanding, maintaining a data center requires a high investment, not always coupled with business goals. So, the risk of keeping this infrastructure larger or smaller is transferred to the provider, and the client company chooses to pay what it consumes, which it needs, given the resilience of the services in the Cloud. This risk is even greater for a company with a medium-sized fleet of systems, where under-investment leaps may be more difficult. Another issue is that mission-critical systems require very well-built uptime and fault tolerance solutions, and the risk is usually absorbed more efficiently by the cloud specialist.

Reducing costs is due to a specialization in the infra-investment of the provider, and possible choices due to the scale of infra-utilization and standardization of procedures. That is, a storage administrator or server will manage a much larger amount of equipment than a traditional enterprise, due to good standardization of actions in the Cloud Data Center and choices of a certain number of technologies used. The cost of electricity, square meter and personnel when divided by computational capacity and storage will be much lower due to economies of scale; productivity technologies; virtualized environment management; and also because of possible choices for the environment (such as location, taxes, self-power generation, partnerships, scale buying) generating a lower cost base for Cloud Data Center maintenance. Of course, the cost reduction will be all the more significant, as will the study of the feasibility of migrating to the Cloud. There, where a certain complexity of IT processes will be associated with each candidate solution, it will design a more or less standardized and possible maintenance of the migration from the point of view of the least cost. This varies greatly with models and types of Cloud, which we will see later.

For companies that do not focus their own IT infrastructure as a direct selling element, it is not always easy to justify the costs of specialists associated with areas that support the company’s end-activity. Naturally, this has been the option in all these years, since agility and automation with systems was differential in all segments. However, this issue comes back a bit with the option to leave some of this infrastructure intelligence to the cloud provider, pay for it, and have a service level agreement that guarantees the company’s systems and data needs. Given the flexibility of contracted Cloud models, types and sizes, companies can weigh in what volume and look they want to transfer this infrastructure support intelligence to a cloud provider.

It’s interesting to browse Cloud providers to see how they offer their offer, what resilience or flexibility, what types of cloud or business models they offer. The truth is that the market is still forming in this aspect, including in what concerns the consolidation of prices. Possibly, prices will further decline with providers’ scale gains and increased competition.

These success factors of Cloud are the same motivators of companies. But there is another that is fundamental in the speed of the digital world. Expand markets, increase volumes, incorporate other companies—some macro business processes require agility as a foundation of success. Expanding systems and their data in the Cloud is something really fast, given that the resources are guaranteed on demand, in the criterion of customer use, it is the pay-as-you-grow model, done in an almost instantaneous way.

An interesting fact in the provider business model with Cloud is a larger segmentation, with input from other players. We think of traditional providers like Google and Amazon on one side, and one company as another customer. But today, we have some companies that, in partnership with the providers, offer a service at the top of services in the Cloud. For example, on Database facilities, Storage, and use of Web Services-based development platforms, some software developer may offer an innovative service, for example specific Business Intelligence applications that work on databases, applications that interact with the data of a certain company. They offer services on social networks, applications that index and search cloud information. There are a number of variations, but we can imagine an application that transports the data in processes, services and messages to the users of the company, to meet security, property, etc. requirements. It depends on what’s in the cloud, the company’s interest, and the service offerings of that provider.

(to be continued)

Internal Illustrations from Luiz Marcelo Rezende. Site: https://www.flickr.com/photos/resendrix/ 

Featured Image from geralt at pixabay.com