Emergence and Importance of Cloud Computing for the Enterprise

Written by : Manish Chopra

Date : 30-June-2016

Key Highlights A refresher on cloud computing

Importance of cloud deployments for an enterprise

Cloud deployment models

Open Source OpenStack Cloud Framework

Conclusion

A refresher on cloud computing

Cloud appeared as a buzzword around a decade ago, and the technology has made inroads into many

enterprises now. Cloud computing refers to the practice of using a network of remote servers hosted on

the Internet to store, manage, and process data, rather than a local server or a personal computer.

Companies like Amazon, Google, VMware, SalesForce and a few others have been highly successful in

providing Cloud services. Following are the types of cloud offerings rendered globally.

Figure 1: Types of Cloud Computing Services

Importance of cloud deployments for an enterprise

Traditionally, most of the computing workload has been deployed within the enterprise premises. Cloud

deployments can bring huge cost savings, as you do not have to maintain a 24x7 data center that

requires powering up the entire infrastructure, including air conditioning and cooling.

Cloud deployment models

A discussion on cloud deployment models can be highly varied, depending on the size and type of

organization, and on the type of project to be deployed on the cloud. Below image shows the cloud

models we can use to deploy our web services.

Figure 2: Cloud Computing Models

Open Source OpenStack Cloud Framework

OpenStack is a free and open-source software platform for cloud computing, mostly deployed as an

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). The software platform consists of interrelated components that

control hardware pools of processing, storage, and networking resources throughout a data center.

Users can manage it through a web-based dashboard, command-line tools, or through RESTful API.

Figure 3: OpenStack Cloud Framework

An easy way to try OpenStack can be done freely on trystack.org website, that consists of a large cluster

of hardware running OpenStack on x86 machines. You can login and create your own virtual machine

instances and virtual networks on it for testing purposes. A screenshot is given below.

Figure 4: Dashboard of OpenStack

Conclusion

For any modern IT organization, it is essential to have an active presence on the internet. Few

techniques of automation would enhance such presence, as customers, stakeholders and employees get

a single platform to be in sync anytime and from anywhere. Last and not the least, mobile and cloud

computing combined can be a strong differentiator for the enterprise to grow rapidly.