Cloud Computing – How does it impact me?

In this post I will talk about how it impacts you as a provider or consumer. I will try to address this based on various actors.

Software/Applications ProviderAs a provider of the software, you need to enable the access to software thru internet, not necessarily over HTTP but remote access. This could mean re-thinking the architecture of some your applications. Another key aspect that provider need to add to the software will be the ability to meter and bill the usage of the software. And if provider wants to maximize the profits from the limited infrastructure, they will need to make their software multi-tenant, which again would mean re-architecting the software. You will have to think the application architecture to seamlessly scale (or burst as in Cloud computing terms) into public cloud from private cloud.

Software/Applications Consumer

This model is impacting the way software is consumed and delivered. Since it is delivered thru internet, as a consumer you will have location agnostic access to the software. You will only pay for the time you use it and will seamlessly get the upgrades/patches. Switching to competing software will be quick and easy, at least in terms of using it. For data, a lot will depend upon provider in terms of interoperability offered. You will not have to worry about software upgrades and patching. Although you will have some level of unease, because you would not know the exact physical location of your data. This will concern the enterprise users more than individual user. Industry is gearing towards addressing these challenges as well, I will talk about it more in my following posts.

Date Center Manager/Sysadmin

As a data center operations manager, you would need to design the infrastructure to be flexible enough to be able to scale up and down on-demand. E.g. you would need to make sure that your networks supports the additional IPs needed for the new virtual machines that you add, or you have flexible firewalls to add the new servers provisioned on Amazon to you network. You need to train you sysadmins to be able to administer and operate the instance running in cloud. You will need to create new strategies for disaster recovery and backups to include the servers running on cloud. You can be little relaxed on the capacity planning but still need to have solid understanding of what you need in mid-term and long-term.

CxO
In Cloud Computing era, consumers will buy software and computing (of course not all of it but a good percentage of it) as they buy electricity i.e. any commodity. The economy of scale will enable the provider to delivery software and computing cheaper than they currently do. The reach of the computing power will increase in the developing countries. All this gives CxO an ability to reach to new industries and geos. The availability and the low cost of software will enable the education institutions to teach practical use of the technology rather than only theoretically, especially in developing countries. SME's will be able to benefit from the enterprise software that was earlier out of reach because of high entry cost. E.g. using a SAP or PeopleSoft as a service. 

Regulators
There will be a need to new regulations related to privacy and security. Current regulations would need revision to account for the virtual machines and specially the sensitive data handling.

In the next post I will talk about the enabling technologies for SaaS, PaaS and IaaS.