In June i created with Raphael Volz a Cloud Computing Discussion document named “Cloud Computing Potentials”. I want to introduce to that document here in my weblog:

Cloud computing is one of the major trends in IT and promoted by vendors as a major vehicle to improve IT services and reduce cost. Our report objectively analyses the potential of cloud computing for small and large organizations and provides a sound and objective analysis not dulled by the promises of vendors or the technology hype.

We conclude that Cloud computing applies best practices of enterprise computing that have emerged in the last decades. New is the paradigma to aggregate several physical servers into one abstract computing resource that can be used dynamically and scales gracefully by adding new ressources.

We present two cases showing that cloud services (IT-Services operated by the IT-vendor) are particularly attractive for SMEs, not so much for larger organizations. Also we conclude that public cloud infrastructure such as Google Apps and Amazon Web Services are only cheaper, if inhouse infrastructure utilization is low. We show that high resource utiliziation is needed and tight control of KPIs is required to become a successfull cloud computing provider.

However, also for IT deparments applying cloud computing architecture principles makes inhouse IT-infrastructure more controllable and is therefore a reasonable computing paradigm. We conclude in our report with showing how Open Source Software can be used to building an own cloud computing platform.

The first chapter can be read here. If you are interested in that document please feel free to contact me under “the-cloud (at) volzinnovation.com” .