Trends

Cloud Computing:
IT as a Service
Geng Lin, IBM Alliance at Cisco Systems
David Fu, Microsoft
Jinzy Zhu, IBM
Glenn Dasmalchi, Cisco Systems
© Tadeusz Ibrom | Dreamstime.com”

Industry panelists at an IEEE Computer Society

conference in Beijing look at the opportunities
and challenges emerging from cloud computing
and how their companies are addressing them.

C
loud computing has computing is a nascent business environment for cloud appli-
been a dominant IT and technology concept with cations, and
news topic over the different meanings for different • a flexible infrastructure of dis-
past year, yet an under- people. tributed data center services
standing of exactly what it is and connected via Internet-style
its eventual industry impact— • For application and IT users, it’s networking.
both realized and potential—is IT as a service (ITaaS)—that
only gradually becoming clear. is, delivery of computing, stor- Figure 1 illustrates the architec-
To help demystify the matter, age, and applications over the ture with example products for
the 2008 IEEE International Internet from centralized data each layer.
Conference on Web Services centers.
(ICWS), held last September in • For Internet application develop- The Opportunities
Beijing, included a panel, “Cloud ers, it’s an Internet-scale soft- The traditional IT model re-
Computing and IT as a Service: ware development platform quires business users to make a
Opportunities and Challenges.” and runtime environment. front-loaded investment in soft-
It featured presentations from • For infrastructure providers and ware and hardware as well as a
three IT vendor giants—Micro- administrators, it’s the massive, life-cycle investment in profes-
soft, IBM, and Cisco—address- distributed data center in- sional staff to maintain servers
ing industry perspectives and frastructure connected by IP and upgrade software. IT ser-
cloud computing initiatives. networks. vices in the cloud shift much of
Our panel drew a standing- this expense to a pay-as-you-go
room-only crowd of about 40 aca- We also presented a three-layer model and so offer significant
demic and industry professionals cloud architecture to illustrate cost advantages. For example,
and turned into a lively forum dis- this definition: Microsoft’s hosted Exchange
cussion that ended after just two Online services provide any-
hours because the next scheduled • top-layer applications delivered time-anywhere, multiple-device
session needed the room. on demand in the software-as- access to email, calendars, and
a-service (SaaS) model, contacts for US$10 per user per
What Is Cloud Computing? • middleware providing applica- month, and SharePoint Online
We began the panel with a broad tion services and/or a platform- collaboration services cost just
introductory definition: cloud as-a-service (PaaS) runtime $7.25 per user per month.

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 Using cloud infrastructure
Example vendors
services, companies can redi-
rect resources to more long-term • Cisco WebEx
strategic business development. • Microsoft Office Live
Cloud-based software and ser- • Salesforce.com
vices subscriptions can handle Applications
• Amazon Simple Storage Solution
security, archiving, and busi-
• Akamai Content Delivery Abstract services
ness continuity. Early cloud
• Microsoft Azure Services Platform
computing offerings, such as Flexible infrastructure
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud • Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
(EC2)—appealed primarily to the • Mosso Hosting Cloud (Rackspace)
consumer and small-medium • GoGrid
business (SMB) space, where the
benefits of not having to establish
an IT infrastructure—let alone Figure 1. Three-layer cloud computing architecture. The callouts on the
one that scales on demand—far left list example products for each layer.
outweigh any shortcomings.
But ITaaS is a highly disrup- bracing cloud computing while veloper services includes Web
tive concept for enterprise users, experimenting with business application hosting in addition
who have less to gain and more models that strengthen their to the company’s scalable stor-
to lose by outsourcing IT. Cloud current customer base. age for unstructured, structured,
service providers trying to serve and queue data. Third-party de-
this space must implement enter- Microsoft: velopers don’t have to use these
prise-class capabilities at multiple Software plus Services services to create cloud applica-
levels both in the network and at Microsoft is building its cloud in- tions, but Microsoft designed
the end points. Key business and frastructure to give current Win­- them to make it easier for mil-
technical challenges include cost, dows and .NET users a seam- lions of Microsoft developers
security, performance, business less experience, whether they’re worldwide to do their work.
resiliency, interoperability, and deploying an application on site Several Microsoft SaaS appli-
data migration. or delivering it as a service from cations already run on the Azure
Cloud computing is still in the cloud. Microsoft’s chief platform, such as Live Mesh,
early development. Market re- software architect Ray Ozzie HealthVault, and Events Online.
searchers, financial analysts, coined the term “software plus Hewlett-Packard and several
and business leaders all want to services” to emphasize a strat- other companies are gearing up
assess its potential markets and egy for enabling enterprise us- their development on the Azure
business impact. According to ers to keep some applications on platform as well.
IDC, a market research firm that the ground.
recently surveyed IT executives, Microsoft didn’t formally an- IBM: Transformation through
CIOs, and other business lead- nounce the Azure Services Plat- Customer Implementations
ers, IT spending on cloud ser- form until a month after the IBM launched its Blue Cloud
vices will reach US$42 billion ICWS conference, but the over- initiative in November 2007 to
by 2012 (http://blogs.idc.com/ all architecture and strategy had help corporate data centers op-
ie/?p=224). However, as with any been in development under the erate “more like the Internet.”
disruptive technology and tran- codename Red Dog since 2007. The company scored significant
sitional business model, there is The Azure platform is hosted in commercial successes in 2008,
no definitive assessment of cloud Microsoft data centers through including Wuxi Software Park in
computing’s market opportunity. Microsoft’s Global Foundation China and iTricity in the Neth-
We believe its long-term business Services, which correspond to erlands. These customers are
impact could be even larger. the infrastructure layer in Figure leveraging Blue Cloud to build
1. The platform’s operating sys- dynamic infrastructures that
Three Enterprise tem, Windows Azure, provides provide ITaaS to their end users.
Strategies a development, service-hosting, The Blue Cloud was intro-
As leading IT vendors, Micro- and service-management envi- duced as a way to connect and
soft, IBM, and Cisco are em- ronment. The initial set of de- provision the proliferating array

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 Trends

Table 1. IBM comparison of traditional vs. automatic,

cloud-based deployment times for eight IT management tasks.
IT management task Traditional deployment Automatic deployment

Assign servers 3 days <1 hour

Install software 5–10 days <1 hour
Configure network and security parameters 5–10 days <1 hour
Back up operating system 2 hours 1/2 hour
Recover operating system 2 hours 1 hour
Install operating system patch 2 hours 1 hour
Dynamically allocate computing resources 1 hour 2 minutes
Regulate operating system parameters for many services 10 minutes 1 minute
Total 14–24 days < 6 hours

of end-user devices and sen- ment) capabilities that enterprise • Performance guarantees and
sors and to rapidly develop and customers require. Virtualiza- SLA enablement in general
deploy applications and services tion-aware networking, 10GE, must address latency and QoS
for delivery over networks. The and unified fabric technologies (quality-of-service) issues.
IBM panel presentation included are a few examples of a longer list • Interoperability requirements
a slide comparing times for tra- of network-based technologies must support customer choice
ditional deployments of eight IT that will enable enterprise-class and additional agility—for ex-
management tasks to times for clouds to interoperate. ample, in workload mobility.
IBM’s cloud computing automat- In addition, Cisco provides
ed deployments. Table 1 repro- Web 2.0-based collaboration As the IT industry works to
duces the comparison, showing products. For example, it moved solve these problems, cloud
a total reduction from 14–24 into the cloud applications lay- adoption will occur in phases:
days to less than six hours. er in 2007 when it purchased from the stand-alone clouds in
As part of the commitment IBM WebEx, the world’s largest vid- place today, to enterprise-class
has made to develop technologies eoconferencing service at that clouds with enhanced security
that meet geographically specific time. WebEx Connect is a sub- and SLA capability, and finally
business requirements, the com- sequent cloud application that to full interoperability across
pany has built IBM Cloud Labs uses Cisco data center technol- cloud infrastructures—that is,
all over the world—serving both ogy to let users share presenta- the intercloud.
public organizations and private tions, applications, documents,
enterprises. It has also invested and desktops. It includes Web-

C
in academic initiatives to sup- Ex’s full-motion video and in- loud computing repre-
port research and foster next- tegrated audio in a multimedia sents the confluence of
generation Internet skills it sees environment. technology and business
as critical to cloud computing’s With respect to Cisco’s fo- developments in the Internet,
future, particularly in parallel cus on enabling enterprise-class Web services, computing sys-
programming. clouds and cloud interoperability, tems, and applications that have
Figure 2 shows the development evolved over the past few de-
Cisco: Evolving state of five areas of cloud com- cades. In this sense, it can seem
Interoperability puting technology presented at like nothing new. Moreover, it’s
Cisco sees virtualization and the ICWS panel. Cisco sees three in the early stages of develop-
automation as the key enabling of those areas needing significant ment, operating in public and
technologies of cloud computing. improvement to enable the cloud private cloud silos. In this sense,
As both the internal cloud fabric for enterprise customers: the problem of migrating data
and delivery mechanism to users, between clouds—both public
the network plays a central role • Security must better en- and private—is probably the big-
in enabling clouds with the secu- sure data privacy and iso- gest obstacle to fully realizing
rity, performance, flexibility, and late network traffic through its potential to revolutionize IT
other SLA (service-level agree- partitioning. infrastructure.

12 IT Pro March/April 2009

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 Internet. This scenario could
Technology
issues
ultimately undo the Internet’s
fundamental open, decentral-
Cost ized design, which has fos-
tered so much IT innovation.
To the extent that IT becomes
Flexibility a huge utility, some of these is-
sues might require appropriate
Data privacy government policies and regu-
Security
Traffic isolation lations, such as those that are
applied in today’s telecom ser-
SLA enablement vice provider industry.
Performance Latency

Geng Lin is chief technology officer for

Vendor choice
Interoperability Workload mobility the IBM Alliance at Cisco Systems. Con-
tact him at [email protected].
Needs improvement Enterprise-ready
State of technology development David Fu is the principal engineering
manager for Microsoft’s Global Founda-
tion Services. Contact him at davidfu@
Figure 2. Enabling the cloud for the enterprise. Cost and flexibility microsoft.com.
benefits are enterprise-ready, but security, performance, and
interoperability need significant improvement. Jinzy Zhu is program director for the
IBM Greater China Group’s Cloud
Meanwhile, many industry deployment. The ICWS panel Labs and HiPODS (High Performance
vendors and analysts are call- discussion saw standardization On-Demand Solutions) Asia Pacific
ing 2009 the year of cloud com- of cloud services and data defi- program. Contact her at [email protected].
puting. Certainly, every major nitions as necessary solutions com.
IT vendor has a strategy to to interoperability issues.
capitalize on the cost and flex- The discussion also revealed Glenn Dasmalchi is the technical chief
ibility benefits of cloud com- concerns about a few large of staff in the CTO Office at Cisco Sys-
puting, while addressing the public cloud operators assert- tems. Contact him at gdasmalc@cisco.
issues that constrain its further ing too much control over the com.

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