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Q6-1 Why Is the Cloud the Future for Most Organizations?

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If you go into business for yourself, there’s an excellent chance you’ll have a problem
just like Falcon Security’s. What is the best way to support your Web site or other
information systems? Should you use the cloud? Most likely, the answer will be yes.
So, then, which of your applications should use it and how? You need the knowledge
of this chapter to participate in the conversations you’ll have. Of course, you could
just rely on outside experts, but that doesn’t work in the 21st century. Many of your
competitors will be able to ask and understand those questions—and use the money
their knowledge saves them for other purposes.
Or what if you work for a large company that has embraced the Internet of Things
(IoT)? Will you make products that send and receive data across the Internet? How will
your products connect to the cloud? Will a cloud offering make sense for you and your
customers? How will you know without some knowledge of the cloud?
We begin this chapter with an overview of why the cloud is the future for most
organizations. Then, in Q6-2 and Q6-3, we will discuss background technology you
need to know to better understand how the cloud works and what organizations can
do with it. We’ll discuss local area networks, the fundamentals of the Internet, how
Web servers function, and the purpose of basic cloud technologies. Then we’ll return
to discussing how organizations can use the cloud, basic steps for setting up a cloud
presence, and cloud security. We’ll wrap up with the cloud in 2026.

Q6-1 Why Is the Cloud the Future for Most

Organizations?

Until 2010 or so, most organizations constructed and maintained their own computing
infrastructure. Organizations purchased or leased hardware, installed it on their premises, and
used it to support organizational email, Web sites, e-commerce sites, and in-house applications
such as accounting and operations systems (you’ll learn about those in the next chapter). After
about 2010, however, organizations began to move their computing infrastructure to the cloud,
and it is likely that in the future all, or nearly all, computing infrastructure will be leased from the
cloud. So, just what is the cloud, and why is it the future?

What Is the Cloud?
We define the cloud as the elastic leasing of pooled computer resources over the Internet. The term
cloud is used because most early diagrams of three-tier and other Internet-based systems used a
cloud symbol to represent the Internet (see Figure 5-13 for an example), and organizations came
to view their infrastructure as being “somewhere in the cloud.”

Elastic

Consider each of the italicized terms in the definition. The term elastic, which was first used this
way by Amazon.com, means that the computing resources leased can be increased or decreased
dynamically, programmatically, in a short span of time and that organizations pay for just the
resources they use.
Suppose a car manufacturer creates an ad to run during the Academy Awards. It believes it
has a fantastic ad that will result in millions of hits on its Web site. However, it doesn’t know ahead
of time if there will be a thousand, or a million, or ten million, or even more site visits. Further, the