The Cloud - as a computing platform

"the cloud" is a computing platform - it has to be managed on an ongoing basis.

Any comprehensive cloud strategy must involve a complext evauation of costs, benefits, busienss cultureal issues, risks adn coprorate and govet standards.

In future, as well-tested commercial cloud services becoem available, companies will increasingly be able to relay on these services not just for IT cost savings but also for delivering new vaue to the organization.

Companies which strive to provide cloud based services must provide customers with a simple process for monitor busienss process which live enitrely or partially in a cloud environment. An organizations computre dependent business processes need to be constalnly monitored by softward.

Cloud computing business models are essentially baesd on rental arrangements.

Compare two cost models.

Operating Expenses: Paying per month, per user for each service
Capital Infestments: paying a purchase fee plus yearly maintenance for sofware that resides within your organization.

Application Platform Interfaces (APIs) - are an important phenomenon in cloud computing. Vendors develop proprietary APIs for their own cloud computing platforms, so customers are forced to support multiple APIs. For an organization to readily build connections between it's internal data centre and teh cloud, it must use stnadardized APIs and data trrsnasformation capabillities.

Provisioning - is a term whjich refers to immediate requests which cloud computing customers make for resources.

The cloud service provider is resonsible for aintaining anagreedon level of servicesand provisions resources accordingly.

In the case of PasaS or IaaS, customersnmay need to directy requeset additional resources, becuase tin both cases they're directly managing the cloud resources instead of haing them managed by the cloud provider.

Note: One of the immediate attractions of IaaS is that a data center could move its volatile workloads into teh cloud adn pay for addtional resources on demand.

So, hardware use inteh data centre is much more efficient, when a cloud computing option exists.

The cloud itself is a service managment ploatform.Therefore, well-designed cloud service protfolio's include a taight integration of the core service managmeent capabillities and well-defined interfaces.

Biggest Problem which Organizations face when considering moving applicaton systems to the cloud isthe issue of software dependencies. The cloud uses service oriented archietecture approach (based on loosely coupled services).