Cloud computing approaches cause interest to service providers and users

Cloud computing has become a popular word in the IT industry over the past two years. People may not know the meaning of the word or question whether the word is meaningful or not. But at an important cloud-computing Conference in New York this week, analysts and manufacturers agreed on a standard definition of cloud computing and agreed that the cloud computing approach is causing interest among service providers and users.

Cloud computing itself is really not a technology, but a way to build IT services. These IT services can control many of the convergence factors in the IT field, including rapidly increasing server computing power and virtualization technology. Virtualization technology can combine many servers together to form a large computing pool and divide a server into multiple virtual machines, and turn them on or off as needed.

Led by companies such as Amazon, some vendors are building large-scale, scalable server farms to provide computing power, storage, business software, and applications to build platforms on the Internet. These vendors use self-service interfaces to enable users to access resources at any time they need and discard those resources when they are no longer needed. The dedicated cloud computing that the enterprise deploys for its users is based on the same principles. However, the enterprise is completely within its own firewall to do so.

The basic message from vendors is that while cloud computing is still in its early stages, cloud computing is a solution to these problems.

Sys-con's meeting happened to meet with the formation of the Cloud Computing Security Alliance. The Cloud Computing Security Alliance is an industry organization that urges the adoption of unified best practices in web-based computing on an on demand basis. In addition, the "Development of Cloud Computing Manifesto" was published this week. The document urges vendors to agree on basic principles related to the interoperability of cloud computing and competing cloud computing services. The manifesto was criticized by Microsoft. But the manifesto has many supporters, such as AMD, IBM, Rackspace, Sun, and VMware.

Reuven Cohen, founder and chief technical expert of Enomaly, a cloud-computing start-up, said he planned to address the Cloud computing Forum in Wednesday, advocating the creation of an industry association to focus on what is a cohesive view of cloud computing.

While many vendors are still defining cloud computing in different ways, Cohen argues that we can still compete, but there is no need to tell different stories about cloud computing. We also have the opportunity to unite to develop this market.

However, there are still many questions about cloud computing that remain unanswered. Users need data security, performance, and availability, and a service-level agreement is required to guarantee the minimum standards for these three items.

While companies such as Amazon and Rackspace provide computing power on the web and software services for companies such as Salesforce.com, some third-party vendors that provide services in cloud computing are just beginning to emerge.

Using standard interfaces to help users turn workloads into virtualized platforms and external cloud computing services cohesive FT's chief technology officer, Patrick Kerpan, says the main concern is security and the ability of users to control their own resources. Cloud computing has improved in many ways than existing systems. But cloud computing is certainly not a panacea for poor design.

Vogels says the cloud maker can be judged on 5 points: Security, scalability, availability, performance, and cost savings. He predicts that cloud computing, though flawed, will make great strides in the coming years. ' It's still the first day of cloud computing, ' he said. We have just begun to apply these services extensively.