Jan 21 2009
Cloud Computing in 2009
Cloud Computing is certainly a term that I keep hearing more and more about, but yet I am not really sure what it means. I certainly think that it is overused and abused ;) (I am going to resist all cloud related puns in this post!)
More importantly, I am not yet convinced that it will be the solution to as many problems as some people claim. Yes, I think that there are some areas that will benefit greatly from cloud computing, but I do not think that anybody really knows exactly which areas these are yet.
I read a good introduction to cloud computing recently in A crack in the madness of clouds. The author tries to identify the different application areas where cloud computing might make an impact, and he provides examples where possible. The application areas that he identifies are:
- Infrastructure-as-a-Service
- Storage-as-a-Service
- Data-as-a-Service
- Platform-as-a-Service
- Software-as-a-Service
Salesforce is perhaps the most widely known example of a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) application. I think that it is quite significant because it started many people using SaaS applications without them actually knowing that they were doing this. I think that one of the dangerous of this has been that people do not realise the disadvantages of these types of applications. However, I think that people will quickly gain a negative perspective as incidents of these SaaS applications becoming unavailable occur more frequently. For example, over 900,000 customers were recently unable to use SalesForce for over an hour according to Salesforce.com outage exposes cloud’s dark linings.
Perhaps it is not surprising then that SalesForce are developing a new form of cloud computing, known as the Service Cloud! The idea of this appears to be to unify in a cloud all of the information that is exchanged with customers using the different interfaces that are supported by a company. For more details about this see Salesforce.com tackles customer service with the Service Cloud.
I wonder will 2009 be a decisive year in the life of cloud computing!
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