Cloudonomics: The Business Value of Cloud Computing, + Website

Users, Enterprise, and Cloud

There are many variations on network architecture, each with differing cost implications, depending on the pattern of use of the applications residing on that architecture and their data transport requirements. We can generally partition the multitude of architectures into six generic combinations of users, enterprise data center(s), and cloud data center(s).

We use the term “users” very broadly to mean any endpoints outside of the cloud or enterprise data center. Users may be individual consumers, business partners, or corporate employees, using laptops, tablets, smartphones, personal music players, set-top boxes, streaming video devices, immersive videoconferencing setups, electronic whiteboards, etc. Increasingly, “users” may be sensors or actuators, tied to individual people, such as patient monitoring devices; tied to vehicles, such as GPS tracking systems or video surveillance devices; on pets; embedded in air conditioners, dryers, and thermostats; or even laid out in open fields, such as farm temperature and irrigation sensors.

A small to medium business, enterprise, or government may have one or more data centers or equipment closets. And the “cloud” typically will comprise several data centers, which may have one or more data links that are used to communicate with users and enterprises, between cloud providers (the Intercloud), or between data centers within a given cloud provider (the intracloud). We can simplify this complexity and consider ...