Cloudonomics: The Business Value of Cloud Computing, + Website

Infrastructure as a Service Benefit

A core set of benefits associated with SaaS ultimately is that associated with infrastructure as a service: Pay-per-use pricing is beneficial when there is variable usage; on-demand provisioning is beneficial when there is unpredictable demand; common infrastructure enables not just multiplexing, as with infrastructure, but the even more efficient multitenancy; and location independence, typically enabled by a SaaS cloud provider’s distributed infrastructure, enables a responsive user experience.

However, we have to be careful to consider which models we are comparing. A distributed SaaS model may beat a single-instance enterprise data center software model thanks to a richer, more interactive experience due to geodispersion. But in the same way, a client app may beat a remote server-based one with an even richer and more interactive experience. And the client app will work even when the network is unavailable due to an outage or network coverage issues.

Applications with different profiles may have different breakeven points: A relatively low-powered device may benefit from the immense computational power that the cloud can bring: Running a search query on your smartphone is unlikely to be as fast as enlisting 1,000 state-of-the-art servers in parallel in the cloud. It is not unreasonable to assume that no matter how much data our smartphones can store, there will always be more data—whether personal or the world’s information—that we will want ...