ARC Advisory Group’s Tenth India Forum in Hyderabad, India, featured an interactive session on cloud computing. This session answered questions posed by executives from various industries and provided suggestions and recommendations.
Cloud computing technology can help simplify business processes at an affordable cost via virtualised servers, infrastructure, software and platform as services. Although some global companies offer cloud computing services, in India and many other countries, it is still a nascent technology.
C.S.R. Prabhu, deputy director general, National Informatics Centre (NIC) and Andy Chatha, president, ARC Advisory Group, gave presentations that covered the technology’s history and current status; various architectures and service and deployment models; end user benefits; NIC’s cloud implementations; plant software in the cloud and facts versus myths.
Today’s world is full of many emerging and disruptive technologies. ARC believes that cloud computing is among the most important. The concept generally incorporates combinations of services, such as infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and software as a service (SaaS). Related technologies include grid computing, utility computing and autonomic computing.
Cloud computing evolution
Cloud computing evolved over a period of time with roots that can be traced back to application service providers in the 1990s. It is similar to SaaS (developed from utility computing) and includes IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS. It offers dynamic provision of service/resource pools – application, platform, and infrastructure as services on demand. Examples include Gmail, CastIron, Google Appengine, Amazon EC2, Microsoft’s Azure Platform, and Sun Parascale. Users can activate and retire resources and dynamically update infrastructure elements without affecting the business.
Benefits and characteristics
Data centres are usually extremely underutilised and often idle around 85% of the time. They typically suffer from drawbacks such as over provisioning, insufficient capacity planning and sizing, and improper understanding of scalability requirements.
Thought leaders from ARC and other market research and analyst firms agree that cloud computing can offer significant advantages for fast-paced start-ups, small and medium sized businesses (SMBs) and larger enterprises alike, as it provides cost-effective solutions for key business demands and moves workloads to improve efficiency.
Key cloud computing characteristics can provide significant benefits for users of the technology. These include:
* Agility – on demand computing infrastructure, linearly scalable.
* Reliability and fault tolerance – self-healing, efficient backups.
* Service level agreement (SLA)-driven – policies on how quickly requests are processed.
* Multi tenancy – several customers can share infrastructure without compromising privacy and security of other customers’ data.
* Service oriented – compose applications out of loosely coupled services. One service failure will not disrupt other services.
* Virtualised – decoupled from underlying hardware. Multiple applications can be run in one computer.
* Data – distributing, partitioning, security, and synchronisation.
Public clouds exist beyond firewalls and are fully hosted and managed by the vendors. Public clouds offer start-ups and SMBs quick setup and automated management with a pay-as-you-go model that helps start small and grow as needed. However, security and compliance issues hinder the adoption of public cloud computing applications.
Private clouds, in contrast, exist within the boundaries of the organisation’s firewall. Unlike the public cloud, private clouds allow organisations to manage on their own. Some advantages include fine-grained control over resources, increased security and the flexibility to schedule and reshuffle resources based on business demands. Private clouds are ideal for applications related to tight security and regulatory concerns, but development requires hardware investments and in-house expertise. This results in higher cost than for public clouds. Hybrid clouds are partly private and partly public.
For SMBs, scalability and cost issues often outweigh the need for reliability. However, large organisations can choose a private cloud based on security, privacy and control concerns. Some of the leading cloud providers include Amazon, VMware, Appistry, 3Tera, HP, Joyent, CITRIX, B-Hive, Microsoft, MOSSO, and Q-layer.
Plant software in the cloud: fact vs. myth
The most important and valuable assets in the plant include people, equipment and devices, systems (control, manufacturing execution, asset management and other systems) plus information about the above. To improve the performance of each of these assets, industries should rely on new technology solutions such as cloud computing. Furthermore, most industries in Asia do not have large data centres and cloud computing can provide them with an opportunity to leapfrog.
In some cases, moving plant data to the cloud can be as simple as buying a smartphone on a rental/contract basis. Furthermore, today, most software systems are readily available in the cloud and can be deployed and used straight away within a short time frame.
For more information contact Paul Miller, ARC Advisory Group, +1 781 471 1126, pmiller@arcweb.com, www.arcweb.com
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