Page 27 - How Cloud Computing Is Transforming Business and Why You Cant Afford to Be Left Behind

THE C L O UD REV O L UTION

simultaneously. The display is refreshed in real time; it’s
like a panorama of ongoing, intense human inquisitiveness
around the globe.
Google’s operations have many of the characteristics of
the cloud: a modern data center resource, built from low-cost
components, managed as a whole, activated by end users on

the network, and delivering automated results without either
party knowing much about the other’s systems. This applies to
both Google’s search engine and what it calls its Google App
Engine, where developers build applications to run in the
Google cloud. But what distinguishes some data centers that
are labeled as being “in the cloud,” like Google’s, from some
others that meet this description without by common consent

being included as well? In the end, even the description given
here is inadequate to define where the essence of the cloud
lies. Among good technologists, this definition would set off
a debate that would still be going as the search visualization
spikes descended over Los Angeles and began to rise above
Honolulu, Tokyo, and Beijing.
Instead of debating the technology innovations in the
cloud data centers—and there are many of them—we need to
stand this debate on its head. It’s not its most prominent fea-

ture, the huge Internet data center, that is the cloud’s defin-
ing element. Rather, that is just one building block. The cloud
is actually a number of advances—the data centers, the Web’s
setting of conventions for loosely coupled systems (two sys-
tems that don’t know very much about each other), and an
ability to activate virtualized servers remotely via standard Web
services—that converge to give the cloud its enticing power.

7