For a long time, data centers have faced a critical challenge: the number of applications and amount of data in the data center continue their rapid growth, while IT struggles to provide the resources necessary to make services available to users and meet today’s demands using existing infrastructure and organizational silos.
For too long, this siloed approach has hindered IT from adjusting dynamically to new business requests. In existing silos, application workloads are tightly coupled to physical assets, with software linked to operating systems to manage availability, enforce security, and help ensure performance. This tightly coupled model has resulted in the proliferation of server and storage devices, with attendant costs and maintenance overhead, to meet user demand.
Unfortunately, only a small portion of each dollar spent on IT today creates a direct business benefit. Customers are spending approximately 70 percent of their budgets on operations and only 30 percent on differentiating the business. Because data center IT assets become obsolete approximately every five years, the vast majority of IT investment is spent on upgrading various pieces of infrastructure and providing redundancy and recoverability: activities that consume approximately 60 to 80 percent of IT expenditures without necessarily providing optimal business value or innovation.
As a result, IT has been forced to focus on simply keeping the data center running rather than on delivering the kind of innovation that meets user needs for faster, better services while also meeting requirements and ensuring business agility.
What was needed is a solution with the scale, flexibility, and transparency to enable IT to provision new services quickly and cost effectively by using service-level agreements (SLAs) to address IT requirements and policies, meet the demands of high utilization, and dynamically respond to change, in addition to providing security and high performance.
Cloud computing provides a solution for meeting this challenge. Cloud computing is being proposed as one answer to the challenges of IT silos—inefficiencies, high costs, and ongoing support and maintenance concerns—and increasing user demand for services.
The term cloud computing has different connotations for IT professionals, depending on their point of view and often their own products and offerings. As with all emerging areas, real-world deployments and customer success stories will generate a better understanding of the term. Let’s start with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) definition:
