Page 18 - How Cloud Computing Is Transforming Business and Why You Cant Afford to Be Left Behind

INTRODUC TION

and understand why they came to you in the first place—and
what they may want next.
In its most popular form, such as Amazon’s Elastic Cloud
Compute (EC2), cloud computing is a reorganization of ex-
ternal resources into a hitherto hard to conceive of set of com-
puting services. Computing cycles of nearly any magnitude

can be tapped at will. The amount of resources devoted to the
job expands if, say, a surge in customer traffic makes it advis-
able to do so. And this expansive data center accessed through
the Internet can be utilized at low hourly rates with the swipe
of a credit card.
Perhaps the single most compelling feature of the cloud
is that it is programmatically accessible by outsiders, the end

users who have work for all those concentrated processing
units. Automated processes have been built in to make cloud
services readily available to anyone, regardless of location, as
long as that person can pay the hourly rate. It’s something like
iTunes. You upload a small set of information related to your-
self and get back a favorite song, without having to appear at a
store and sort through bins. However, in the cloud, it’s an en-
terprise application that goes out over the wire and the results
of processing all that data come back.

No single technology is responsible for the advent of the
cloud. Broadband communications, Web standards, multicore
servers, and the ability to manage large groups of computers
as if they were a single machine—these are the components
of cloud computing. Mix them together, along with a ten-
dency to organize business applications as services, and things

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