Management of Organization & Technology

Table of Contents

BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY3

INTRODUCTION5

HISTORY OF CLOUD COMPUTING6

Where has the Cloud come from?6

Where is the Cloud today?7

ADOPTION OF CLOUD COMPUTING8

DEFINING CLOUD COMPUTING AS DISRUPTIVE TECHNOLOGY - S-CURVE ANALYSIS12

Defending Cloud Computing as Disruptive Technology14

DRIVERS AND INHIBITORS19

Favourable drivers are lifting the Cloud23

Accelerated deployment26

Extreme scalability27

Focus on core competencies28

Cloud computing inhibitors29

Data security29

Availability and performance - can you rely on the Cloud?30

Control and compliance - can you trust the Cloud?31

Provider maturity and viability33

Changing IT organizations33

ASSESSING THE MARKET35

Macro indicators are favourable36

Political36

Economic37

Social38

Technological38

Environmental39

Legal39

REFERENCES41

Management of Organization & Technology

Background of the Study

Prior to the wide availability of cloud computing, there had been several forerunner technologies, counting utility computing, grid computing and thin clients, employed to acquire remote access to the resources of computing (Leavitt, 2009: 15-20). Leavitt describes that such technologies are;

A thin client comprises of a monitor and a keyboard in connection with a hub computer.

Grid computing refers to an assembly wherein several comparable systems frequently separated in terms of geography are able to process the tasks of computing transmitted to the centralized server from the user. The tasks of computing are dispatched by the centralized server to the available resources of computing.

Utility computing is defined as a process of imparting the facilities of computing to the distant users, frequently on a free basis, founded on the employed cycles, much as imparting an electronic utility.

The utility computing and the grid computing, both have several comparable or similar features to the ones of cloud computing, having users transmitting tasks to a hub server which organizes those tasks so as to be executed.

A few of the basis forms of cloud services count software, platform, and infrastructure, all as a service (Leavitt, 2009; 15-20 National Institute of Standards and Technology [NIST], 2009). Further, Leavitt ropes in a wide-ranging group namely services despite, these applications and services are spread by NIST over the rest of the three groups. As elucidated by Leavitt, the elucidation of these services trails the following;

Services comprise of databases, collaboration, middleware and storage imparted by means of the internet.

IaaS or “Infrastructure as a Service” is an inclusive infrastructure of computers imparted through the internet.

PaaS or “Platform as a Service” is an inclusive or fractional environment of application development which is available online, with maximum possible collaboration.

Lastly, SaaS, or “Software as a Service” comprises of wide-ranging applications of turnkey computing like for the resource management of an enterprise, obtainable online.

All of these applications jointly embrace the preponderance of the sorts of services of computing obtainable form cloud computers, varying from the services of software and hardware to the inclusive environments of computing (Velte, 2010).

Introduction

Cloud computing refers to the custom of contracting out some portion of the technology of a company to a common mediator setup. The term cloud computing is novel however the notion is not new. Comparable contributions in history have been familiarized with the term “Application server provider”. The cloud in the term cloud computing generally denotes the internet and the entirety of the term comes to pass form this ...