Page 40 - How Cloud Computing Is Transforming Business and Why You Cant Afford to Be Left Behind

MANA GEMENT STRATEGIES F O R THE CL OUD R EV OL UTION

results back over the Internet. Anyone who creates an account
on Amazon’s EC2 can put it to work. In effect, it’s activated
with a swipe of a credit card.
Many businesses are experimenting with Amazon’s EC2 to
see how it works and what it can do for them, but not much of
the enterprise computing workload has moved off businesses’

premises into the Amazon infrastructure cloud.
Take the example of drug researcher Pieter Sheth-Voss at
Eidetics when he needed to explore the characteristics of a set
of 8.6 million patients in order to design a drug test. When he
tried to do so on his company’s Oracle database system, it took
a minute and a half just to find out what portion of the pa-
tients were female, and he had hundreds of characteristics

that he wanted to explore related to many pieces of data on
each patient. He was going to need days of compute time, and
he didn’t know how to get it.
This skilled director of research was new to the company;
Eidetics had just been acquired by Quintiles, a firm that con-
ducts tests for pharmaceutical companies. Quintiles enforced
stringent requirements about handling data. Sheth-Voss had
no established working relationships with the IT staff in the
new company, and he realized to his dismay that it was going

to take weeks to get a database server assigned to him.
Instead, he turned to Amazon’s EC2, where the database
system he needed, Vertica, had already been installed and was
available as a service for an hourly charge. It took the researcher
15 minutes to prepare his research program and data, send it
to Amazon, and provision a set of servers. The job started at
9 p.m. one evening and finished an hour later.

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