Moving away from terra firma

A hundred years ago, companies stopped generating their own power with steam engines and dynamos and plugged into the newly-built electric grid. The cheap power pumped out by electric utilities didnt just change how businesses operate. It set off a chain reaction of economic and social transformations that brought the modern world into existence. Today, a similar revolution is under way. Hooked up to the internets global computing grid, massive information-processing plants have begun pumping data and software code into our homes and businesses. This time, its computing thats turning into a utility.
Nicholas Carr in the Big Switch

No other technology has so much sizzled in the past few years as has cloud computing. The ability to provision hardware and software remotely seems to have completely taken enterprise computing by storm. So much so, that any and every technology prediction that comes out these days has to include cloud computing in it.

Products and services built around this concept by companies like Salesforce.com, Amazon, IBM, Google, Microsoft, and others proliferate in the market today. Much like the clouds that hover over us in real world, cloud computing too is lingering on top of enterprise data centers, enticing the IT decision-makers.

As a matter of fact, in the book the Big Switch, Carr likened cloud computing to the all pervasive electricity grid network and postulated that in the days to come, we will be using computing resources in the service model.

Thus, in a cloudy world if you require extra storage or processing power, no need to buy a storage box or extra RAM, just call in the cloud service provider (CSP) and the company will provide it to you instantly. The road ahead would leads to the Kingdom Cloud, as many would like us to believe.

And yet, even as we are gung-ho about the cloud and the future, there seems to be some confusion on what exactly cloud computing is. In the name of clouds, there is a virtual alphabet soup that gets dished all the time. Thus, in the past it was SaaS (Software as a Service), then came PaaS (Platform as a Service), then came IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), CaaS (Communication) and even XaaS (everything as a service). What are these then?

Similar to clouds which have many varieties like Cirrus, Cumulus, Nimbostratus, there are many paths of cloud computing. All these acronyms represent different paths; all leading to one goal: Kingdom Cloud, where everything gets dynamically and remotely done and in a cost effective manner.

Thats as far as the concept goes. The real issue is in shifting on to the cloud-based setup within an enterprise. And no matter how easy the various vendors portray it to be, it is not as easy as opening an email account. Many IT managers, who had to shift from a traditional on-the-premise infrastructure to a SaaS or an IaaS model, recall with horror the transition that took place.

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