Introduction to Cloud Computing

Cloud computing has gotten enormous coverage lately, with claims for benefits that may or may not be realized. The cloud does not enable a wired and informed electorate; that comes from online services and Internet linkages, whether they are hosted in the cloud or in the government's own infrastructure. The cloud does not provide 100% uptime and availability of packages and data; the net will stay up, however a vendor can nevertheless go down, can everything considered be hacked through a denial of service attack, and can all the same provide faulty data or faulty applications. Senior executives, politicians, and CIOs with corporate government agency responsibilities, need to know what the cloud is and is not, and what it can and cannot promise. They need to understand the risks and the rewards, in order to use it safely and effectively, and in order to contract cloud services safely and at a fair price.

Essentially, cloud computing is an extreme form of outsourcing, one in which hardware ownership and operation, software version updating, data storage and backup, and occasionally other functions as so then, are all outsourced to a singe vendor. In addition, hardware is as a rule located at the cloud vendor site, where massive racks of servers and farms of storage devices process the applications and maintain the data of huge numbers of users to achieve efficient operation. Since the data and the programs are located "somewhere" in the to all appearances nebulous structure of the web and accessed remotely through the Internet, this form of shared remotely hosted service is called cloud computing.

Form of outsourcing

Seen as a form of outsourcing, cloud computing offers a so then-defined set of benefits; these are the benefits that are traditionally associated with outsourcing, and most are then known and then studied. The first clearly are associated with economies of scale: a large vendor will make much more efficient use of personnel, and a large vendor sees much less variation day by day in demand than each individual user will encounter and consequently can do more effective load leveling and will require less excess capacity or "safety stock" in computing resources. As a result, a large vendor can charge for actual usage, allowing those users with high demand at a given time to consume unusually high levels of resources and pay higher total fees, during allowing users with lower demand to consume fewer resources and to pay lower fees. Economies of scale as well allow large vendors, whether cloud-based or not, to perform more R&D than smaller users could perform.

There are several of benefits to modern online computing that are wrongly lumped with cloud computing, like online access from any location, social networking, community outreach, and ubiquitous connectivity. These are more accurately attributed to remote web-based access, and to all intents and purposes are not inextricably linked to the cloud. The cloud is an outsourcing service delivery mechanism, and the web is the medium for delivery.1

Extreme form of outsourcing

As an extreme form of outsourcing, cloud computing has the risks that are traditionally associated with outsourcing. In actual fact, since cloud computing is an extreme form of outsourcing, which moves data storage and backup, ownership of all facilities, and all aspects of facilities management to a single vendor, its risks are somewhat exacerbated compared to other forms of outsourcing or facilities management. After a fashion this may not appear to be very different from the timesharing model of computing that was prevalent in the late 1960s and early 1970s, except that in the era of timesharing we tended to use shared remote facilities to run ad hoc analyses, during now we use the cloud to run operational software that controls every aspect of an organization, from product scheduling, inventory control and vendor management to sales and customer support and relationship management. In doing so, during cloud computing may be just another form of shared facilities outsourcing, its risks may be more extreme than the risks of previously forms of outsourcing.

Poaching will be in the extreme difficult to monitor and detect, and along these lines extremely difficult to limit should vendors choose to violate their ethical and legal obligations. This, combined with the potential for shirking security responsibilities, explains why security always features so prominently among customers' lists of concerns with cloud computing. These problems are not unequalled to the cloud, nevertheless the extended chain of custody, from the vendor, through the net, to the client, may make it more difficult to establish the source of leakage in a nutshell.

1 - I can own a kitchen and hire a chef, with the associated fixed costs, and at the time deliver meals to my constituents via a fleet of taxis or via Federal Express. When I choose to use FedEx I have chosen to use the web, to put it more exactly than private connections, as I might have done decades ago. In the same fashion, I can choose to outsource meal preparation from ARA or Marriott, pay only for the meals I order, eliminate my fixed costs, and nevertheless use Fed Ex for delivery. Here ARA is approximately equivalent to "cooking in the cloud" and Fed Ex is in broad outline equivalent to remote online access. By analogy, I can provide a host of eGovernment services to my constituents with or without the cloud.