Who is using cloud computing: Five Points

In many ways, although cloud computing exists in many forms, it is still a very young technology. This is partly because technology requires a certain amount of time to mature, for example, in large-scale cloud computing, often to cope with a large number of unstructured datasets, and in this regard there is no established a coherent way of communication. From all the available products in the market today, even its underlying basic technologies are still at a very early stage of integrating various component tools into useful systems to the extent that they can be consumed by the IT department.

Pan, president of Red Hat Greater China

But even so, there has been enough practice in cloud computing to make preliminary judgments about some of the patterns. These patterns will undoubtedly evolve over time as new products begin to be marketed or barriers to adoption are eliminated. However, the following five ideas tell us how to use cloud computing today, and what are the ways that users can be tempted.

Software as a service (SaaS)-It's really exciting, but it's a limited amount. Interacting with users is the application, not the computing infrastructure or the development framework. That's why companies like Salesforce.com are the early advocates of cloud computing. SaaS and related forms of online Web services dominate in some vertical areas, such as customer relationship management. However, in familiar patterns, legal and other risk management concerns have forced many companies to think twice about SaaS, even if harmless features like e-mail are implicated. They will ask questions in many ways, such as when data has been hacked or notified by court summons, but so far no one has been able to answer these questions explicitly. SaaS will undoubtedly continue to grow for some types of applications, that is, for relatively standardised applications that are often used in different companies, but to make this model more widely available to the enterprise, there must be more products to take into account their specific operational process requirements.

The enterprise constructs the private/mixed cloud on the heterogeneous architecture. Both private and government large and medium enterprises have completed the planning stage and started to build their own cloud. The reason why they want to build, not hire, is because of the aforementioned regulatory consistency and risk management issues – their infrastructure is not necessarily safer or more reliable, but controllable. However, in many large institutions, the requirements of such a cloud are complex and must be adapted to the existing application and infrastructure mix. They also want to use the public cloud to improve efficiency and to provide their users with the self-service services that the public cloud has and the ability to quickly invoke new computing resources – but this must be done within the framework of the cloud. This means they cannot just build a new IT infrastructure or add a range of cloud resources to the traditional infrastructure. Their goal is to build a cloud that can leverage existing IT resources wherever possible.

Maintaining the flexibility of the future is a major concern. As companies build their cloud, they often say they are trying to avoid and let cloud computing lock their businesses on specific products or technologies. It is believed that the initial trust in cloud computing is not from the vendor community, but from the end users want to use cloud computing to solve the explosive complexity and size problems. That's why open source software is the backbone of the public and private cloud. Open source software certainly delivers very high value, but it can also provide you with an opportunity to reshape your project to match your priorities and requirements. Therefore, the methods commonly used by enterprises will maximize the portability and interoperability of different clouds. It is no coincidence, therefore, that many cloud-computing products that do not satisfy a reasonably open definition also boast an open nature.

Compliance and risk management are also a major concern. We have already mentioned this issue, but we should be more specific, because this issue will often occur in the process of exploring cloud computing and will be closely related to many decisions. It is important to point out that this problem is not just about the relative security or reliability of the public cloud versus the private cloud, it holds the view that cloud computing needs to be systematically considered as an integral part of an integrated IT governance process. The result of such a process might be that some types of data and applications could not be run in a public cloud, or run only in certain public clouds, or run only if certain conditions were met. (for example, some data cannot be stored or copied to other countries.) And risk management involves more than just external suppliers. For example, a private cloud can provide self-service access to users. This will involve access control, policy and process creation, and appropriate auditing and related issues.

A platform, a service (PaaS), makes developers feel more interested. PAAs is the newest direction of cloud computing and one of the most immature. You can think of PAAs as a useful abstraction for developers to make it easier to create applications. It also provides developers with a means to run applications without too much involvement in the underlying infrastructure. This would involve a relatively new concept called "DevOps", in which the traditionally differentiated responsibilities of operators and developers begin to fuse under certain conditions. PAAs can take a variety of forms, but as companies look at cloud computing in a broader way of thinking, the most common driver of platform-Services is the ability to provide portability across the cloud in order to align with it. This means that developers can use a PAAs to develop an application and be able to deploy the application to another place in the future with minimal modification or without modification.

We have discussed several different cloud computing tools, but the overall idea is unified. Only those who respect the value of the enterprise's IT investments, and take care of the laws, regulations and risk management requirements involved in the enterprise IT operations, will be favored by the enterprise. And these cloud technologies must be able to maximize future flexibility.

(Responsible editor: The good of the Legacy)