Cloud Computing Decisions in Real Enterprises

1. Introduction

Enterprises have grown over the years and have increased their computer resources in line with their needs accordingly. The current economic crisis is deeply affecting people and enterprises, and consequently some of them have chosen to optimize their resources while others have opted to share resources with others.

The word “Cloud,” a collective term for a large number of developments and possibilities, is now in fashion after words such as “Grid” and “Virtualization.” Petri (2010) states that this is not an invention but more of a “practical innovation.” However, the term was first defined by Prof. Kenneth K. Chellapa in 1997 as “a computing paradigm where the boundaries of computing would be determined by economic rationale rather than technical limits.” Wikipedia provides more details on how the name and use was defined: “Cloud computing is the use of computing resources (hardware and software) that are delivered as a service over a network (typically the Internet). The name comes from the use of a cloud-shaped symbol as an abstraction for the complex infrastructure it contains in system diagrams. Cloud computing entrusts remote servers with a user's data, software and computation” (Wikipedia, 12/2012).

On the other hand, the NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology www.amazon.com, 2012) and others (the list today is probably longer)) the problem is, as we said in the previous paragraph, that definitions of Cloud are very different, and consequently how people use it is also very different. We define cloud as, “the use of services, platforms and applications using the net, taking all or some of them from the net.” Therefore, almost everybody who is using a smartphone, a tablet, a PC or any other device plugged into the net and using services or applications offered or provided (and of course their platforms) in using the net.