Page 46 - 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

expands according to her needs and shrinks when peak pro-
cessing is over. It may be on one side of the data center one
moment and on the opposite the next. The end user hasn’t
slowed down what she’s doing; the shift in servers occurs with-
out her realizing it. In the cloud, the computer becomes a
shape shifter. It’s not limited by the box it arrived in; instead,

it’s elastic.
When you need a computing resource to serve you, but
you don’t know how much of it you’re going to need, this spe-
cial characteristic of the cloud—elasticity—will serve you well.
To see this elasticity in action, take the example of Greg
Taylor, senior system engineer at Sony Music Entertainment,
who is responsible for the computing infrastructure that

supports the Web sites of thousands of recording artists and
hundreds of individual artists’ online stores. In 2009, Taylor
felt that he had adequate monitoring systems and surplus ca-
pacity built into his infrastructure. At the MichaelJackson.com
store, for example, he could handle the shopping transactions
and record comments from 200 shoppers at a time on the
store’s site.
Upon the star’s unexpected death on June 25, 2009, the
site was suddenly overwhelmed with people who wanted to

buy his music or simply wished to congregate with other griev-
ing fans and leave a comment. Sony Music saw an influx of
more than a million people trying to access the Michael Jack-
son music store over the next 24 hours. Many wanted to post
comments, but could not. The servers stayed up, but not
everyone who wanted to find album details could be served
that information, and indeed, many would-be purchasers

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