Page 155 - How Cloud Computing Is Transforming Business and Why You Cant Afford to Be Left Behind

IT REORG ANIZES

with your customers? What if the application starts and then
goes down, losing the data that it had started to process? A
small savings in capital expense can scarcely compensate for
all the added time that finance will incur if it has to reconstruct
the processes it was using to close the books. Any IT manager
would rather spend money for another server than have a con-

versation with the chief of accounting, who insists on pointing
out every cost incurred as a result of the downtime.
In many IT shops around the world, there’s a conversation
going on over the reality of cloudbursting—can the imagined
savings actually materialize? No one has documented a clear
answer. Yet one of the cloud’s biggest allies in the face of skep-
ticism is today’s economic climate. During the downturn, it

has been hard to expand or hold the line on capital budgets.
It has also become unacceptable to run a server at 10 or 15
percent of capacity 95 percent of the time. Electricity is one of
the highest sustained costs of running a data center, and the
builders of cloud data centers have carefully positioned their
facilities near cheap electricity. They’ve also designed many
power-conserving features into their operations. One way
to share in the savings is to make some use of that new cloud
capacity.

Those who engage in the ambitious task of cloudbursting
will want to ensure that their quickly spun up virtual machine
in the cloud is actually running and doing its job. Amazon’s
EC2 offers a CloudWatch service, where for an additional 1.5
cents per hour per virtual server, the user can see that her vir-
tual machine is running and delivering results. Many users will
want the assurance of a monitoring service outside Amazon,

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