Today’s cloud computing thinking

As in the first phase of the Web, much of the framing of cloud computing today is people and organisations being consumers. The dominant theme is vendors of online services and IT equipment chanting the cloud computing mantra in an effort to get more sales. From a customer’s perspective, everything IT is now available as a service- infrastructure (Iaas); development platforms (PaaS); and software (SaaS). The services are deployed in many flavours, with customers’ encouraged to make sense of private vs. public vs. community vs. hybrid clouds.

Infrastructure and development platforms are of more interest to IT departments. SaaS in the form of online services and applications are what touches most of us. Software delivered as a cloud service is becoming an increasingly dominant consumption path, both for people and organisations. There’s a huge variety available- at home (think email, photos and videos) and for the office (business applications include accounting, collaboration, customer relationship management, etc.)

These services have domain expertise embedded in them. After all, you’re hardly likely to sign up to Xero for accounting or Salesforce.com for customer management otherwise. Many cloud services also act like platforms for other providers to sell their own add-on cloud services.

Yet there’s one thing that underlies the current cloud computing model- the assumption that we are only consumers of cloud services, not producers of them. Just as the first phase of the Web assumed we were only consumers of information.

Ref: Vikram (2012). Today’s cloud computing thinking. [ONLINE] Available at: http://internetnz.net.nz/news/blog/2012/Expertise-Service-EaaS-or-Cloud-Computing-20. [Last Accessed 27 May 2012]

By: Nabin Gautam (1040801)