Page 204 - E-Bussiness and E-Commerce Management Strategy, Implementation, and Practice

M03_CHAF9601_04_SE_C03.QXD:D01_CHAF7409_04_SE_C01.QXD 16/4/09 11:09 Page 171

Chapter 3 E-business infrastructure 171

Figure 3.21 Salesforce.com (www.salesforce.com)

In descriptions of web services you may hear confusingly, that they access ‘the cloud’ or the
Cloud computing term ‘cloud computing’, where the cloud referred to is the Internet (networks are often
The use of distributed denoted as clouds on diagrams of network topology). So for example, if you are accessing
storage and processing
on servers connected by your Google Docs then they will be stored somewhere ‘in the cloud’ without any knowledge

the Internet, typically of where it is or how it is managed since Google stores data on many servers. And of course
provided as software or you can access the document from any location. But there are issues to consider about data
data storage as a
subscription service stored and served from the cloud: ‘is it secure, is it backed up, is it always available?’. The size
provided by other of Google’s cloud is indicated by Pandia (2007) which estimated that Google has over 1 mil-
companies.
lion servers running the open-source Linux software.
Think of examples of web services that you or businesses use, and you will soon see how
important they are for both personal and business applications. Examples include:
Web mail readers
E-commerce account and purchasing management facilities such as Amazon.com
Many services from Google such as Google Maps, GMail, Picasa and Google Analytics
Customer relationship management applications from Salesforce.com and Siebel/Oracle
Supply chain management solutions from SAP, Oracle and Covisint
E-mail and web security management from companies like MessageLabs.

From the point of view of managing IT infrastructure these changes are dramatic since tradi-
tionally companies have employed their own information systems support staff to manage
different types of business applications such as e-mail. A web service provider offers an alterna-
tive where the application is hosted remotely or off-site on a server operated by an ASP. Costs