Cloud Computing as a Model

Background

The utility model of cloud computing holds that it is optimal any general-purpose technology to be centralized where the marginal cost of producing the resource is the lowest (Carr, 2008). The argument has been challenged on the basis that utilities, such as electric power utilities, provide fungible commodities which are freely interchangeable, while computing services have a rich feature sets and impact multiple dimensions of user experience. Supporters of the utility model argue that basic computing such as raw processing power for business computations, storage for digital media, or access bandwidth are commodities; albeit commodities what multidimensional features.

The growing consumerization of information technology, with employees preferring to use personally owned portable devices to interact with the corporate information system, rather than office desktops, creates additional impetus for the adoption of cloud computing by organizations. Users who favor consumerization, often perceive in the house IT as an impediment to technology use, rather than a supporter of new technology. In this scenario, cloud providers, who merely provide access to data and analytics, are perceived as more user-friendly.

Server virtualization is a technology that enables the software image of a machine to function within another machine. Corporate data centers tend to have low utilization of servers, which are typically dedicated to individual applications. Server virtualization optimizes the usage of hardware by allowing multiple images of servers to function within a physical device, resulting in scalable architecture for hardware. Applications requiring few resources can share a physical device, while applications requiring more resources can use multiple devices. Virtualization offers easy scalability of hardware for applications with widely varying demand, as well as rapid recovery from failures, since backed up virtual images of servers can quickly restore a compromised unit. Cloud computing uses server virtualization extensively in large data centers. Much of the economic benefits of cloud computing have derived from rapid improvements in server virtualization technology.