- Image by louisvolant via Flickr
What we talk about when we talk about cloud computing
Tuesday, April 28, 2009 at 9:55 AM
Recently, McKinsey & Company published a study on cloud computing as part of a symposium for The Uptime Institute, an organization dedicated to supporting the enterprise data center industry. We share McKinsey’s interest in helping the IT industry better understand cloud computing, so we’d like to join the conversation Appirio and others have started about the role of cloud computing for large enterprises.
There’s quite a bit of talk these days about corporations building a “private cloud” with concepts like virtualization, and there can be significant benefits to this approach. But those advantages are amplified greatly when customers use applications in the scalable datacenters provided by companies like Google, Amazon, Salesforce.com and soon, Microsoft. In this model, customers can leverage hardware infrastructure, distributed software infrastructure, and applications that are built for the cloud, and let us run it for them. This offers them much lower cost applications, and removes the IT maintenance burden that can cripple many organizations today. It also allows customers to deliver innovation to their end users much more rapidly.
There’s quite a bit of talk these days about corporations building a “private cloud” with concepts like virtualization, and there can be significant benefits to this approach. But those advantages are amplified greatly when customers use applications in the scalable datacenters provided by companies like Google, Amazon, Salesforce.com and soon, Microsoft. In this model, customers can leverage hardware infrastructure, distributed software infrastructure, and applications that are built for the cloud, and let us run it for them. This offers them much lower cost applications, and removes the IT maintenance burden that can cripple many organizations today. It also allows customers to deliver innovation to their end users much more rapidly.
We thought we’d provide some insight into what we mean when we say cloud computing, and how its advantages in cost and innovation continue to attract hundreds of thousands of companies of all sizes — from 2nd Wind Exercise Equipment to Genentech. We created our cloud by building an optimized system from the ground up: starting with low-cost hardware, adding reliable software infrastructure that scales, offering innovative applications, and working every day to improve the whole system. While the McKinsey study only considered the hardware cost savings of the cloud, there is tremendous customer benefit in all of these areas.
Continues @ http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com
Related articles by Zemanta
- McKinsey’s Cloud Computing Report Is Partly Cloudy (techcrunch.com)
- Cloud computing’s nemesis: data in motion (insidehpc.com)
- Cloud Computing Unification Getting Ugly (themindstorms.blogspot.com)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=d4789309-9d55-4848-a419-d62e86aea115)
