Some of you have asked me about Cloud Computing and where could you learn more about it? Cloud computing is often taught in the Information System Management (ISM) program as it is focusing on the management of Information Technology (IT) infrastructures (hardware, software, network etc). I have also written several articles on Cloud computing previously in this blog.
Basically Cloud Computing is a computing model, not a technology. In this model, all the infrastructures such as servers, networks, applications and other elements related to IT data centers are provided to users via the Internet by an external cloud service company. Instead of having its own IT organization, a company can buy IT services and connect to the "cloud" for infrastructure services (Network, servers etc), platform services (operating system), or software services (Software as a Service application). Cloud computing makes an entire IT infrastructure look like a “Virtual cloud” to users and let them pay exactly the amount of storage, computing power, security and other functions that they need.
There are advantages and disadvantages of cloud computing. The most common disadvantage is security risks. Everything the company has is now stored in the service company’s systems and they could be accessed by unauthorized people. Although Cloud Company promises that customer's data is secure but with since security management is not yet perfect, a customer's ability to know for sure who is accessing to their data or using it is still limited. That is why some companies are hesitating to adopt cloud computing.
In theory, users just connect to the cloud and everything should work well. In reality, there are different technologies and different standards, if Cloud computing company uses different standard or technology than yours then some applications that you use may be incompatible with cloud company’s infrastructures. Therefore it may need more time to modify to make sure they can work. You cannot just move all applications to the cloud and expect them to run immediately.
The conservative approach of some companies is only move specific works to a cloud service provider to take advantage of the provider's capacity, but not everything. Certain sensitive data are to be kept in house for better control. Of course, cloud computing companies argued that by not move everything to them does not make sense as they have strict control in their environment than in a normal IT organization. They also said that they can add capacity or applications almost at a moment's notice but many customers are still not convinced. At least, not yet.
Basically, Cloud computing is still evolving and it probably takes few years to be adopted fully but it is an important direction as software is quickly becoming more of a service than a product.
Prof John Vu
Carnegie Mellon University
Original source: http://www.segvn.org/forum/mvnforum/viewthread_thread,1722
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