Cloudonomics: The Business Value of Cloud Computing, + Website

Beyond Business

If you are reading this book, you probably already know that such applications must be delivered out of enormous data centers, the size of one or more football fields, specially sited based on low power and cooling costs, leveraging state-of-the art broadband fiber and fourth-generation networks that connect such data centers to advanced technology endpoints such as high-definition smartphones and tablets. Or must they?

In fact, while you may think of these as advanced applications only for use in the developed world, emerging affordable mobile technologies, hardened, containerized data centers, and new middle earth orbit satellites will enable cloud-based applications just about anywhere in the world. It’s not just smartphones that can sit in the palm of your hand; new technologies can place a wireless base station—formerly the size of a closet, if not a car—into that same palm. Alcatel-Lucent, for example, recently announced its lightRadio device, which looks like a bronze Rubik’s cube but can process thousands of simultaneous cell phone calls over a multisquare-mile area and fit in your pocket.38

Solar-powered data centers in power-efficient containerized pods coupled with these mobile technologies mean that cloud services can be dropped into the middle of nowhere and provide end-to-end services: endpoint, network, and cloud, even if there is a complete lack of power and network infrastructure. Even without these advances, cloud-based services are already driving ...