In the digital world, where the proliferation of high-speed Internet connections and cheaper,more powerful computing technology are increasing customers’ expectations for service and performance, businesses must have the flexibility to act quickly.
Cloud computing is responding to the call, providing a highly virtualized, dynamic infrastructure flexible enough to support transformative business change. We believe that cloud computing is a useful tool for reframing IT services and moving from managing your information technology costs as a capital expenditure to managing them as an operating expense.
Cloud technology, is short for cloud computing—it’s all you hear about right now. Calm Response can help you make sense of it all, and show you how you can make the cloud work for you.
When you choose cloud solutions based on Microsoft® or IBM or VMWare technologies, we can help you reduce your capital expenses and save money by paying only for the computing power you need, and get to market faster by leveraging your existing IT skill investments.
Private cloud solutions feature solutions from Dell, Microsoft, IBM or VMWare. Public cloud solutions support business productivity with Microsoft BPOS, Office 365, LotusLive and flexible cloud computing through the Windows Azure™ platform, Salesforce and Google Apps.
Whether your cloud is public or private, we can show you a solution that’s more flexible, more cost-effective, and more you.
What is cloud power?
At the end of the day there really are only 3 ways in which an organization can get the IT support it needs to properly support their business:
Cloud Computing
A method of delivering Remote Computing Services – including storage, servers, processing, memory, network bandwidth, applications and services – typically over the public Internet, using a shared infrastructure, that is Dynamically Scalable (Up & Down) and Virtualized. In one of its greatest contributions to cost-efficiency, a “utility pricing” (PAYG) model lets customers pay only for what they use.
Cloud computing incorporates the concept of software as a service, and can also leverage both open source software and web 2.0 principles for co-creating content.
Popular cloud computing technologies include salesforce.com, Google Apps, Amazon Web Services, Netsuite, facebook.com and Gmail. A powerful component of these applications is that such a sophisticated interface and accompanying data can easily be accessed through a web browser and an internet connection. The end user does not need to be concerned with the underlying technology and where or how the data and applications are stored.
- They can build it out on their own or with someone’s assistance.
- For key workloads, or functions they can acquire pre-integrated systems or appliances that accomplish the task, and then run and manage it themselves.
- They can acquire the IT, or IT support as a form of service from a third party.
No matter which IT acquisition model they choose, cloud computing is a new delivery and consumption model that spans all three. A company can build out their own private cloud environment, they can purchase a pre-integrated system designed specifically deliver a cloud delivered workload, or they can acquire a cloud delivered workload as a service from a third party.
Cloud computing evolved from internet consumer services and is about creating a delivery and consumption model of IT-enabled services that is all about the end user experience, end user control, and end user self-management.
Next Step
So what? Why should I care? MONEY
The economic factors driving cloud computing are not new technologies. Rather it is the combination of existing technologies with a focus on the end user and enabling the end user experience.
- Virtualization drives higher utilization which lowers capital expenses.
- Standardization also reduces capital and labor costs,
- Automation reduces management costs, drives an enhanced user experience and automates many manual tasks to reduce errors and reduce the costs associated with managing an environment.
You can have cloud without these elements, but it will not be a cost effective cloud that delivers with stability and an enhanced end user experience of self-enablement and self-management.
However, when these three are aligned:
- you can provide scalable services.
- you’re going to see efficiency.
- And that’s the way you’re going to drive down costs and improve service.
The Cloud Impact
With budgets tighten, cloud computing provides a means to continue innovative research and development activity while conserving cash. It provides rapid access to resources, process simplicity and autonomic functions. Developers can test new applications or prototypes without procurement and provisioning delays, and they can perform intricate computations, modeling and analyses.
Startup Life in 1999, Before the Cloud (.pdf) Bloomberg Business Week
Cloud computing enables companies to acquire the services or computing capacity they need to enter new markets or crossover into new industries. They can also deliver services from their own cloud or a provider’s cloud to profit from their core competencies in new ways.
Cloud’s ability to marshal resources in a matter of hours or days enables companies to speed their time-to-market. Being able to make portfolio and operational enhancements rapidly, and before competitors do, can provide real advantage.
In 2007, The New York Times, was preparing a full online archive dating back to 1851, they needed to convert 11 million articles, already scanned into digital images of newspaper pages, into a format more conducive to web presentation. The Times software developer Derik Gottfrid, wrote a program that would glean the bits and pieces of each article from the 150-plus years of image data and assemble them into individual PDF files. He used Amazon Web Services (AWS) and its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) utility, renting 100 so-called virtual computers to manipulate the stored images in parallel and save the newly created PDF files back on Amazon servers. The reported cost: $240. Using the “cloud” he accomplished in about 24 hours a job that would have taken weeks of planning, provisioning and processing, and thousands of dollars of dedicated hardware and software had the newspaper used internally owned and operated resources.
Cloud computing has inherent risks, which raise added concerns about loss of control and privacy. Still, with careful planning and an understanding of cloud providers’ security practices and controls, companies can safely reap the rewards of both public and private cloud environments.
Interestingly, cloud computing could actually make leading security technologies more accessible and affordable, especially for companies that already struggle to implement them effectively or justify their cost. Security can be delivered as a service, at a scale commensurate with both the user’s requirements and the level of threat, minimizing the need for investment or maintenance. Resiliency features allow cloud computing to be used preemptively to shift files in the event of a disaster situation, preventing loss and accelerating recovery.
As far back as 2009, (it seem a long time ago), Deloitte consultancy concluded that the scale of major cloud computing providers had grown sufficiently to ensure that their security measures would likely be stronger than what most companies could implement internally. “Generally, the level of computer security, data privacy practices and the expertise of major cloud service providers are likely to be greater than those provided by an in-house IT staff and systems,” according Deloitte’s report, Moving to the Cloud.