Cloud Computing - Is it Right For Your Business?

Cloud computing, put simply is the use of computers located on the Internet for your day to day computing needs, including services like web based e-mail and data storage as well as more complex tasks.

Cloud computing has a number of advantages over more traditional computing; however it also has a number of weaknesses. In this article I'll try and give you a balanced view of the pro's and con's of cloud computing so that you may make your own mind up as to if it's for you and your business.

Pros

Price - Probability the most cited advantage of cloud computing is the cost, there are two main cost savings associated with cloud computing. They are, the capital expenditure, the amount of money needed to buy the IT equipment initially and the long term maintenance and support. While the cost saving of not having to buy the initial infrastructure may be obvious, there is also an ongoing saving associated with outsourcing your IT services, the economics of scale means that the price of maintenance and support can be brought down to slightly less than if you where hosting the data yourself, but still allowing your cloud suppler to make money.

Scalability - Image if you suddenly realized you needed to double the size of your network storage how easy would it be for you to do that? Normally you would have to find a suppler who supplied the same type of equipment as you currently use, ring them up, hope they have enough in stock then wait for them to be delivered and then hope you can get them all working together without too many all-nighters. With cloud computing it could be as simple as login into your control panel and selecting the new amount of storage you need.

The situation is even more extreme if you turn this on its head and consider what would happen if you suddenly needed half your network storage. Traditional you would be stuck with a load of equipment you don't need that is slowly going out of date, with cloud computing if you no longer need it you no longer have to pay for it, you just login to your control panel and reduce the amount of storage you need.

The Environment - Because of the same economics of scale that make cloud computing cheap, cloud computing is also more environmentally friendly than traditional computing. When computers in the data centre are not processing your data, they will be processing someone else's, why have two half full hard drives when a data centre can combine them an you will only need one disk.

Cons

Security - The main concern regarding cloud computing is that of the security of your data. While your twitter "tweets" may not be the most important chunk of data ever your financial records may well be. Sadly companies go out of business, sometimes very quickly and with little time for you to do anything about it.

Uptime - While a guaranteed uptime of 99.9% such as that provided by Amazon S3 accounts, sounds very impressive it's worth thinking what this means in terms of downtime. 0.1% of a month, the amount of time Amazon can be down before they give you anything compensation is 43 minutes 50 seconds, which if it were to happen just as you or your boss needed that file for the big presentation then throes 40 minutes could feel like days.

Of course all computer services no matter if they are in-house or cloud based suffer downtime, but the problem is compounded within cloud based computing because you only become aware of it when your customers complain or you need the service, and there is nothing you can do directly to fix the problem.

Legal - One of the leased cited but possibly damaging aspects of cloud computing is the legal issues involved. For example, Companies based in the European Union can no "export" data that identifies to countries that don't comply with the European Union's data protection laws, this included countries such as the USA. This would mean that a company in the European Union could be breaking the law if they where to use a cloud computing service based in the United States to store their customer database.

While cloud computing has a number of advantages, it's a cheap, it's Scalable and it's more environmentally sustainable than an in house solution, there are a number of other issues that need to be looked at before you move your business into the cloud. It is of course possible to mitigate some of the problems with cloud computing, while still reaping some of the benefits, by limiting the move to the less mission critical parts of your business.

Singapore Polytechnic to Launch Educational Cloud Computing Center

Inside the Singapore Polytechnic Electrical and Electronic Engineering Cloud Computing Center

Related Topics: asia, cloud computing, cisco, netapp, citrix, singapore

(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- The Singapore Polytechnic Electrical and Electronic Engineering Cloud Computing Center (www.sp.edu.sg) is set to launch, marking the first educational institute in Asia Pacific to provide students with the latest skills in cloud computing through an operational data center environment.

Conceived by its School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, the SPE3C3 will provide teaching staff and students in the school with "on-demand, scalable, virtual computing and storage in labs to enable more sophisticated projects and research work," according to the press release.

The SPE3C3 was developed in collaboration with technology providers Cisco, Citrix Systems and NetApp.

Singapore Polytechnic is using the benefits of cloud computing to realize cost savings, energy efficiency and dynamic scalability.

The resources will initially be available to the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering students on campus, then later be accessible to all students on and outside of campus via Internet access in the near future.

"The new SPE3C3 shows Singapore Polytechnic's commitment to innovation in education and the use of cutting edge technology to provide its students with relevant and up-to-date training to develop their skills in virtualization, enterprise and cloud computing," said Tan Hang Cheong, principal, Singapore Polytechnic. "Singapore Polytechnic graduates will be truly work-ready in the cloud era and be able to contribute immediately to the industry upon graduation."

Starting in April 2012, students in the third year of the Diploma in Computer Engineering course at Singapore Polytechnic's School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering will be able to take two new elective modules, Data Center Management and System Virtualization.

These new courses are designed to educate and train students to setup, manage and support data centers, virtualization techniques and data recovery.

SPE3C3 is built on integrated cloud architecture from Cisco, Citrix and NetApp, specially configured to support up to 31,000 input/output operations per second.

The SPE3C3 can power up to 400 virtual machines, as well as have the ability to start-up and shut-down 240 server virtual machines in six minutes, 20 times faster than the standard industry benchmark.

The solutions implemented in SPE3C3 are powered by Cisco, Citrix Systems and NetApp and will deliver a unified, pretested, and validated shared infrastructure that caters to Singapore Polytechnic's data center and desktop needs.

The collaboration with Cisco, Citrix and NetApp allows cloud access for teaching resources, laboratory experiments, complex projects, lecture notes and lesson materials, enabling students touse the latest, industry standard technologies in cloud computing and storage resources for their research or projects.

During periods of low use such as school holidays, Singapore Polytechnic plans to use the SPE3C3 to provide students with practical experience in the management and configuration of a virtualized data center.

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