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Figure 6-2 Q6-1 Why Is the Cloud the Future for Most Organizations? 241
Apple Data Center in Maiden, NC
Source: Google Earth

possible to centralize power generation so that organizations could purchase just the electricity
they needed from an electric utility.
Both cloud vendors and electrical utilities benefit from economies of scale. According to this
principle, the average cost of production decreases as the size of the operation increases. Major
cloud vendors operate enormous Web farms. Figure 6-2 shows the building that contains the
computers in the Web farm that Apple constructed in 2011 to support its iCloud offering. This
1
billion-dollar facility contains more than 500,000 square feet. Amazon.com, IBM, Google,
Microsoft, Oracle, and other large companies each operate several similar farms worldwide.

Over the Internet
Finally, with the cloud, the resources are accessed over the Internet. “Big deal,” you’re saying.
“I use the Internet all the time.” Well, think about that for a minute. The car manufacturer in
the previous example has contracted with the cloud vendor for a maximum response time; the
cloud vendor adds servers as needed to meet that requirement. As stated, the cloud vendor may be
provisioning, nearly instantaneously, servers all over the world. How does it do that? And not for
just one customer, like the car manufacturer, but for thousands?
In the old days, for such interorganizational processing to occur, developers from the car
manufacturer had to meet with developers from the cloud vendor and design an interface. “Our
programs will do this, providing this data, and we want your programs to do that, in response,
sending us this other data back.” Such meetings took days and were expensive and error-prone.
Given the design, the developers then returned home to write code to meet the agreed-on interface
design, which may not have been understood in the same way by all parties.
It was a long, slow, expensive, and prone-to-failure process. If organizations had to do that
today, cloud provisioning would be unaffordable and infeasible.
Instead, the computer industry settled on a set of standard ways of requesting and receiving
services over the Internet. You will learn about some of these standards in Q6-3. For now, just realize
those standards enable computers that have never “met” before to organize a dizzying, worldwide
dance to deliver and process content to users on PCs, iPads, Google phones, Xboxes, and even exer-
cise equipment in a tenth of second or less. It is absolutely fascinating and gorgeous technology!
Unfortunately, you will have the opportunity to learn only a few basic terms in Q6-2 and Q6-3. Before
we define and explain those terms, however, let’s consider factors that make the cloud the future.