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Appendix B
Green IT and Cloud Computing 247

The major risk of moving to grid computing is that the technology is
only starting to be used by commercial enterprises for mission-critical
operations. To date, the primary use of grid computing has been at uni-
versities (where every student’s desktop or laptop computer is considered
a candidate for the grid) or in government research organizations.
It is important to consider grid computing in your company’s IT
strategy because it is the future direction for IT organizations to dramat-
ically improve percentage-utilization of dedicated IT resources that are
now typically “pinned” to an application or platforms, either within or
between enterprises. Also, current technologies are making significant
steps in the direction of grid computing for corporations.

Potential Advantages
Potential advantages of any cloud or grid computing approach
include the following:

■ Location of infrastructure in areas with lower costs of space and
electricity. ptg
■ Sharing of peak-load capacity among a large pool of users, improving
overall utilization.
■ Separation of infrastructure maintenance duties from domain-specific
application development.
■ Separation of application code from physical resources.
■ Ability to use external assets to handle peak loads (for example, so you
don’t have to engineer for highest possible load levels).
■ Not needing to purchase assets for one-time or infrequent intensive
computing tasks.

It is probable that organizations would look to have a mixture of data
and applications that live in the data center and in the cloud. Small and
medium-sized enterprises would entertain the notion of a higher per-
centage of data and applications in the cloud because of cost factors,
whereas it would be much lower in the case of large enterprises because
of reliability, security, and trust issues. Large enterprises might consider
cloud infrastructure for small projects and specific development stage
work and move them to the data center once they are ready for produc-
tion. Also, this approach may be considered if the ease of using a cloud