There has been a lot of talk and hype about Cloud computing lately. Many organisations that were involved in web based services are rebranding as fast as they can to be included. So with the future focus of cloud computing who can benefit and why?

The two real users are small/medium and enterprise businesses. From these two groups there are effectively three different reasons why they enter into the cloud arena.

Small/Medium Business

Cloud computing or more precisely Saas and Daas services are the real benefit for small and medium businesses. The arrival has now provided a means for small organisations with little or no technical know how or limited budgets to establish infrastructure, services and products for their customers rapidly.

The lower entry costs and pay for what you use mentality is a huge enabler. These organisations are hoping to achieve from cloud computing:

• lower costs and removing large capital requirements
• modernise their business processes though access to quality services and software
• remove the need for dedicated in-house technical staff
• lower TCO for infrastructure

These organisations generally do not have data centres stacked with servers. Many have PC class hardware or low end white box servers. Cloud computing options like Saas and Daas allow these organisations to move forward without maintaining hardware.

This area has previously been serviced by local IT integration vendors and more recently outsourcing. Cloud computing takes this a step further and almost completely removes the requirements for any IT infrastructure in house.

Enterprise Business

Many large enterprise businesses want the same results as their small cousins. Enterprise business requirements change depending on the exact nature of their business. The areas they are interested include:

• outsourced management and housing of all services
• more flexible IT environment
• less reliance on internal IT staff
• dynamic resourcing based on demand
• lower TCO

Most large enterprises have already been involved with server consolidation using virtualization and then virtual desktops. For these organisations the step into the cloud is a small iteration along a path they have already begun. Some CIO’s boldly state that they hope to never host another server again.

The normal users of cloud computing are more reserved. Organisations use the various offerings to meet a need as well as reducing infrastructure costs. The general IT services are still contained and maintained by internal staff. Google Apps, Zoho and others are slowing getting larger enterprises to consider them as real alternatives to locally installed and managed Microsoft products.

A growing number of Enterprises are now wanting the Elastic promise of the cloud technology, but within their own organisation. This is a bizarre stance really. Cloud services are essentially based on and rely on the virtualization of servers, services and storage. So what they really want are virtual servers that dynamically respond to resource requirements. They can already do this, but would require actual capacity and availability management.

Summary

The offerings of Google, Zoho, Amazon and other similar products will meet the needs of most organisations who want a more flexible approach to applications and services. This is the real benefit of Saas, Daas and Utility computing.

For those enterprises that want to remove internal infrastructure, Microsoft will most likely be the best option when the Azure services come online. The cost will be high and the only savings the organisation will achieve is with utility costs and IT Support. Microsoft hosting their own products will be hard to beat from a technical dominance stand point. Microsoft has previously stayed out of the Service provider market leaving that to integration partners, but with Azure Microsoft it will now become a super sized service provider and squeeze out the smaller integration and hosting specialists.

I cannot see large enterprises giving up control of their infrastructure easily. I also wonder how they plan to handle support issues, user training and helpdesk services. If the services and software are external all those services and support will be essentially defunct. Afterall, there is no point having a jockey without the horse.

As usual the winners in the end will be the organisations who can provide a flexible service that is secure and reliable.