Page 19 - How Cloud Computing Is Transforming Business and Why You Cant Afford to Be Left Behind

INTRODUC TION

will never be the same again. This new computing power will
change the way companies will do business.
Today, cloud computing is most frequently thought of as
an external resource, the public cloud. Tomorrow, you will
find your organization reorganizing its data center around
cloud principles. If this is done adroitly, your internal cloud

will be smaller and less expensive than the former data center.
That’s because for years corporate data centers have been over-
built. Now they will be right-sized and will align easily with an
external cloud that can absorb the spikes that you send it.
You will be provisioning your own facilities for near steady-
state operation, rather than workload peaks. When unusual
demands occur, say, in accounting at the end of the quarter or

in the holiday rush at the end of the year, you will be able to
move them off to the external cloud. You’ll have to pay for the
time you use, but immense savings will be gained by avoiding
that former compulsive overprovisioning.
This hybrid cloud, a mix of external public resources and
reorganized internal resources, and how it will affect what
your company can do are what this book is about. No such hy-
brid clouds have been designed from the ground up yet—it’s
too early—but they’re evolving out of today’s infrastructure.

In effect, your data center of the future is a hybrid cloud.
Cloud computing will solve the problem of overprovision-
ing and the tendency of data center budgets to invest heavily
in keeping the lights on and the computers running, when
what they really should be doing is solving new problems. The
cloud will also bring its own complexities and management

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