Cloudonomics: The Business Value of Cloud Computing, + Website

Community Clouds

For the case of perfectly correlated demand, there is no statistical benefit to aggregating demand and serving it out of pooled resources. If there are any economies of scale, and they are significant enough to overcome the diseconomies of scale and cost structure disadvantages to result in a delivered price advantage versus do-it-yourself, then there would be benefits to aggregating demand to exploit these economies. If the customers are all interconnected in some way, there also might be benefits to colocating them—for example, reducing the distance and delay associated with data sharing and application interconnection. But there is little statistical benefit to aggregating customers with highly correlated demand, unlike the situation with independent demand.

A concept often discussed among cloud strategists is so-called community clouds. There are two ways to interpret this notion. One is that the community might involve a business Web or virtual network of collaborating organizations—for example, physicians, hospitals, health insurance firms, diagnosticians, and pharmacies. Another example might be consumer packaged goods manufacturers, transportation companies such as trucking and shipping firms, customs clearinghouses, retailers, and credit card companies. At the software layer, this can make sense; for example, the medical network could provide secure access to electronic patient records including medical diagnostic images, that are HIPAA (Health Insurance ...