Cloudonomics: The Business Value of Cloud Computing, + Website

Is the Cloud New or a New Buzzword?

There are some who say that cloud computing is just old technology—mainframe time-sharing, outsourcing, virtualization—wrapped up in a new buzzword dreamed up by marketers.

I think it might be more appropriate to say that it is a classic business model, leveraging increasingly mature technologies, applied only recently in its entirety in a convenient to use and mature way to the domain of computing.

We’ve discussed what cloud computing is; let’s compare it to prior approaches with which it exhibits some similarities.

• Cloud is not classic time-sharing—but it certainly has similar characteristics. The cloud is based on a different scale-out architecture, whereas the time-sharing model was intended for access to a single mainframe computer. The cloud also introduces the additional dimension of geographic dispersion to support location-independent processing of highly interactive workloads.
• Cloud is not managed services. Managed services come in a variety of flavors, such as basic managed, performance managed, and remote management. Basic managed services are typically resources such as managed servers or managed storage. In this model, one or more physical servers, say, are provided to a customer with either basic monitoring and management (e.g., ensuring that the server is alive and responding to pings, i.e., requests to verify its health) or enhanced monitoring and management (e.g., ensuring that the server is processing at least 5,000 transactions ...