As an environmental engineer at Duke University, I studied different types of clouds and the mechanics of their movement in the sky. At that time I could just look at a cloud and tell the type of atmosphere and weather conditions that were present. While the science that went into that analysis is now far beyond me, it appears clouds are again a hot topic! If you read anything in business technology you are likely to see several mentions of cloud computing. Currently there is not a more over-hyped and thus confusing term. Several companies are offer cloud based solutions; well what are they really providing?
I recently attended a wonderful seminar by the Burton Group (http://www.burtongroup.com/) on the topic of cloud computing. I found their classification to be very crisp and straightforward. They classify cloud offerings into one of four categories:
- Application Clouds (Software as a Service) – these are SaaS based solutions and the most common cloud offerings today. In supply chain TMS are the most common SaaS solutions available.
- Platform Clouds (Platform as a Service) – these solutions provide a development environment and tools to build custom applications.
- Software Infrastructure Clouds (Software Infrastructure as a Service) – this type of cloud offers baseline software capabilities such as RDBMS, EAI, and ETL.
- Hardware Infrastructure Clouds (Hardware Infrastructure as a Service) – these are elastic on-demand hardware and OS capabilities. Amazon’s EC2 has created the most buzz in this area. These solutions are ideal if you are experienced with virtualization and rather than virtualize on your internal hardware you would prefer to buy hardware by the drink from someone else.
I think the above classification is extremely useful before your company goes rushing into the cloud. Take the time to understand what your real goals are for pursuing a cloud based solution and then find the right sub-set of vendors that can meet your requirements; otherwise you will spend a lot of time, like I did in college, just looking at the clouds.
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