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The Greening of IT
240 How Companies Can Make a Difference for the Environment

Another large, successful Internet retail company, Amazon, Inc., uses
the cloud computing approach to provide a variety of infrastructure-
related services (cloud services) to consumers. Amazon Simple Storage
Services, also known as Amazon S3, is storage for the Internet (cloud
storage). Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that stores
and retrieves any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the
Web. It gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable,
fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its
own global network of Web sites. The service aims to maximize benefits
of scale and to pass those benefits on to developers. In a similar manner,
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) provides a virtual com-
puting environment and enables a consumer to ramp up capacity with
new server instances easily.
During October 2008, IBM announced the availability of a free beta
version of a web-based software suite called Blue House for collaboration
(cloud collaboration). The software suite is accessible from the Internet
and can be used for scheduling meetings and projects, storing and shar-
ing documents, instant messaging, and making PowerPoint-like web
ptg
presentations. The applications providing the software suite are hosted
on IBM’s servers and made available on-demand. The approach addresses
the issue of using the Web for driving greater business collaboration.
Blue House services will eventually be based on paid subscriptions and
will help companies that cannot afford to set up and run a detailed
infrastructure for providing collaboration services for its employees and
business partners.
The cost benefit nature of services provided by independent organiza-
tions such as Amazon through cloud computing enables the model to be
readily accepted by small and medium businesses and individual con-
sumers. However, security concerns relating to Internet threats and
application vulnerabilities and loss of control over data and infrastruc-
ture can prevent the approach from being used by large companies. Such
companies can afford the cost of setting up and running the infrastruc-
ture in exchange for some of the advantages such an approach brings.
However, the “sharing-of-resources” aspect of cloud computing and the
advantages thereof is giving shape to private cloud computing, which
is a different take on the mainstream Internet-based version. A private
cloud is a smaller cloudlike IT system within a corporate firewall that
offers shared services to a closed internal network. Consumers of such a