Lets Understand Cloud Computing Stack...

SERVICE MODELS

Software as a Service (SaaS) - The capability provided to the consumer is to use the provider’s applications running on a cloud infrastructure. The applications are accessible from various client devices through either a thin client interface, such as a web browser (e.g., web-based email), or a program interface. The consumer does not manage or control the underlying cloud infrastructure including network, servers, operating systems, storage, or even individual application capabilities, with the possible exception of limited user-specific application configuration settings.

 

Platform as a Service (PaaS) - The capability provided to the consumer is to deploy onto the cloud infrastructure consumer-created or acquired applications created, using programming languages, libraries, services, and tools supported by the provider. The consumer does not manage or control the underlying cloud infrastructure including network, servers, operating systems, or storage but has control over the deployed applications and possibly configuration settings for the application-hosting environment.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - The capability provided to the consumer is to provision processing, storage, networks, and other fundamental computing resources where the consumer is able to deploy and run arbitrary software which can include operating systems and applications. The consumer does not manage or control the underlying cloud infrastructure but has control over operating systems, storage, and deployed applications; and possibly limited control of select networking components (e.g., host firewalls).

DEPLOYMENT MODELS

• Private Cloud - The cloud infrastructure is provisioned for exclusive use by a single organization comprising multiple consumers (e.g., business units). It may be owned, managed, and operated by the organization, a third party, or some combination of them, and it may exist on or off premises.

• Community Cloud - The cloud infrastructure is provisioned for exclusive use by a specific community of consumers from organizations that have shared concerns (e.g., mission, security requirements, policy, and compliance considerations). It may be owned, managed, and operated by one or more of the organizations in the community, a third party, or some combination of them, and it may exist on or off premises.

• Public Cloud - The cloud infrastructure is provisioned for open use by the general public. It may be owned, managed, and operated by a business, academic, or government organization, or some combination of them. It exists on the premises of the cloud provider.

• Hybrid Cloud - The cloud infrastructure is a composition of two or more distinct cloud infrastructures (private, community, or public) that remain unique entities, but are bound together by standardized or proprietary technology that enables data and application portability (e.g., cloud bursting for load balancing between clouds).

30 years ago, connections through the “cloud” were very expensive and typically only available through the incumbent (monopoly) telecommunications provider. Users would be large enterprises with the need for accessing common data in different locations, such as between Head and Regional or Branch Offices. The development of the Internet as a service environment supporting relatively low cost devices and storage capacity has led to the current growth in “cloud computing”. The commoditisation of services and applications through mobile devices has created a generation of consumers/end-users who accept the “cloud” environment as the normal way to access information, services and communications. This, in turn, has put pressure on large enterprises because the barriers to entry have been lowered through cloud computing. Small medium Enterprise have largely benefited through the introduction of cloud in that they are now able to compete head to head with large enterprises. They no longer have to invest hardware and software installations and updates.

Now that we have given background to cloud computing world and how it works, the next blog will explain in detail the benefits and limitations of cloud and also propose suggestions on how enterprises can overcome these limitations. We will also share views from a cloud conference held in Johannesburg organised by ITWEB supported by Microsoft SA on the Economic Impact of cloud computing on South African SMME’s.

References:

• Armbrust, M., Fox, A., Griffith, R., Joseph, A. D., Katz, R., Konwinski, A., ... & Zaharia, M. (2010). A view of cloud computing. Communications of the ACM, 53(4), 50-58.
• Subashini, S., & Kavitha, V. (2011). A survey on security issues in service delivery models of cloud computing. Journal of Network and Computer Applications, 34(1), 1-11.

Fashion Waves in Information Systems

Response paper to Baskerville and Myers (2009)

When one mentions a word “Fashion” I am sure for most people, you mind will take you to a world of clothing and glamour trends. You immediately think of fashion parade, fashion week, Paris, Italy, New York etc. In my view, fashion trends are associated with time or seasons and they usually come and go. I’m sure you are probably wondering how fashion is associated with Information Systems. Well this week’s blog is an attempt to share and respond to Baskerville and Myers paper on technology fashion waves. 

Abrahamson and Fairchild (1999) define management fashion as a relatively transitory belief that a certain management technique leads rational management progress. On the other hand, Miller and Hartwick (2002) suggests that these fashion trends appear to be new and innovative, but some are in fact “just old wine in new bottles” and repackaging of old concepts.

If one takes into account the two definitions above, can one then classify cloud computing as fashion technology in the IS context? 

The origins of cloud computing technology can be traced back as far as the 1960’s when John MacCarthy wrote that “computation may someday be organized as a public utility.” All the way to the 90’s when Sales force.com delivered cloud business applications. This proves that cloud computing as a concept has been around for some time, however the question to ask is whether this technology will stand the test of time being, or is it just one of the technology “ fads and fancies” characterizing IT as referred to by Gregor and Jones (2007)?

Let me attempt answering this question by drawing your attention to Gartner’s cloud computing hype cycle.

Gartner predicts from the graph above that most of cloud services will reach plateau in the next 5 to 10 years. Interesting to note Gartner predicts that services like PaaS will soon be reaching plateau in the next 2-5 years.

One of Baskerville and Myers (2009) paper was to contribute to the discourse relationship between Information system research and practice by assessing the extent to which academics and practitioners influence the fashion trend setting process in IT. They concluded that IS professional should be more proactively engaged in influencing the fashion setting process and in the evaluation of existing IT fashion. However, looking at the recent research done in area of cloud computing, Scopus revealed that there’s over 960 researches done in this area between 2008 and 2015 still reflecting a positive trend and an interest in cloud computing.

In my view, I can conclude that cloud computing is indeed a fashion trend in IT but I do also believe that it is the type of technology that is still relevant and will continue evolving  and being of the key drivers for data increase and usage. The question of whether to adopt cloud or not by IT managers also points to the fact that it is still relevant like any other fashion trend.

Benefits of Cloud Computing for SMMEs':

A view from the ITWEB executive forum held in Johannesburg

Certainly, cloud computing offers many attractive benefits to enterprises. The cloud model moves IT infrastructure from an upfront capital expense to an operational one. Companies can use the cloud for large batch-oriented tasks — those involving large spikes in requirements for processing power — that otherwise would be out of reach or require huge investment.

Cloud computing shifts the IT burden and associated risks to the vendor, who can spread variations over many customers. Organizations can use the cloud to rapidly scale up or down; they can also buy or release IT resources as needed on a pay-as-you-go model.

In 2013 a South African research house Ovum conducted a study on the key benefits of cloud computing amongst South African SMEs'.

The study revealed the following benefits about cloud:

• Greater flexibility: A major selling point for cloud services has been their flexibility and cost-effectiveness versus more traditional ICT approaches.

• Cost reduction: Moving services to the cloud is akin to outsourcing and reduces capex. Just as it does on a global basis, outsourcing also allows South African enterprises to increase redundancy.

• Power cost and reliability: A growing concern among South African enterprises has been the growing unreliability and high cost of power from the national provider Eskom. Companies running their own Data Center have reported that as much as 40% of the overall cost of running the service goes towards power provisioning. This high cost and unreliability of power has prompted more businesses to consider cloud services as an alternative.

• Skills shortage: Cloud services also allow South African enterprises to quickly close the skills shortage gap, as services become centralized and key support functions are outsourced offshore.

• Mobile broadband: The massive growth of mobile broadband in South Africa, where smartphones are expected to out-ship feature phones by the end of 2013, has prompted a rapid increase in the uptake and use of mobile content, with users expected to look to public cloud solutions for storage of multimedia content and processing power that does not reside on the device. Thus enterprises in South Africa are expected to drive the uptake of cloud services as enterprise mobility begins to gain traction.

• Big Data: Data growth and the need to manage large amounts of data, such as transactions records and multimedia, are also driving the uptake of cloud services, with the cost of storage decreasing rapidly. Often there is a misconception among enterprises that data storage and hosting are synonymous with cloud services.

• Lower barrier to entry: The annuity-based pricing and the opex model make it possible for more companies to afford cloud services that they may not have the resources to provide themselves. Many local service providers cite this as the reason the SME sector is leading the market in terms of cloud uptake: cloud services allow SMEs to cut their costs and gain an immediate competitive advantage

In April 2014, I was fortunate to attend an ITWEB executive forum in partnership with Microsoft held in Monte Casino Johannesburg.  The topic of discussion was looking at the economic impact of cloud computing on SMMEs' in South Africa, with special emphasis on the benefits of cloud. The forum highlighted various benefits and challenges making reference to academic literature.  The forum refered to Madisha and Van Belle who reported on research into software-as-a-service (SaaS) readiness and adoption in South Africa (Madisha & Van Belle, 2009), with the intention of informing prospective SaaS adopters about the challenges of adoption and the mitigation thereof. Madisha and Van Belle carried out an extensive literature review and arrived at the following as the characteristic benefits and challenges associated with SaaS (which we find generally apply to the broader field of cloud computing):

Osterman Research published a further white paper in November 2012 (Osterman Research, 2012) which, in our opinion, is an example of how SMME decision-makers can be confused by the proliferation of “data” available on the topic of cloud computing and also demonstrates the tendentiousness of vendor-driven research. 

The paper claims that the three primary benefits of the cloud for small businesses are:

• the cloud can significantly reduce the costs of providing email, voice, fax, real-time and other forms of communication compared to managing these services using internally deployed and managed infrastructure.

• the cloud can improve communications by eliminating the impact of electricity or Internet outages, and it can minimize the impact of slow Internet connections.

• the cloud enables the deployment of unified communications systems and the improved business efficiency that accompany the use of this technology.

Another publication in early 2012 was The Open Group’s “Maximising the value of cloud for small-medium enterprises” (Isom, et al., 2012) – a guide aimed at executives in SMEs. The Open Group Guide explains the principles and elements of cloud computing and suggests that SMEs can benefit from adopting cloud computing in the following ways:

• Quick provisioning of IT services supports rapid time-to-market, thus improving competitiveness;
• The shift from Capex to Opex and scaling of cloud services according to need reduces costs and improves cash flow;
• Cloud computing enables mobility of the workforce

From the literature reviewed above, there is general acceptance among the authors that cloud computing does offer benefits for SME’s, offering the potential for a cost-effective access to the ICT tools that enable businesses to be more efficient, more productive and more competitive. However it is also worth highlighting some of the notable challenges around this technology.

Summing up , following are the my point of view after attending ITWEB forum:

• What are the views and perceptions of the economic value of cloud services by SMME owners and managers? 

SMME owners and managers who understand the cloud computing concept see the potential value, and those who have made the move have generally experienced the actual value of the technology. The primary hindrance to wider adoption seems to be the gap between the vendors’ terminology and the users’ view. Many SMMEs are already using cloud computing in one form or another without realising it.

• What has been the economic impact of the use and provision of cloud services by South African SMMEs?

The economic impact to be largely felt in the simplification of IT issues for SMMEs. Correctly implemented and applied, cloud computing allows the small business owner or manager to focus on their production and their clients, rather than on the technology that supports their administration. Mobility of the workforce and speed of response are enhanced and the risks of loss from systems failure significantly reduced.

• What are the experiences of SMMEs in South Africa with issues related to privacy and security? 

Although there are serious concerns about the potential damage that can result from failure to protect important data, these concerns are more driven by the publicity that surrounds them than the actual experience of SMMEs. For the most part, SMME decision-makers will expect the service providers to minimize any risk of failure in this respect.

• What are the policy implications of SMME experiences, views and concerns with cloud computing so far?

With the exception of the bandwidth issue dealt with in the next question, there are very few policy implications related to cloud computing. The need to comply with the various laws that govern companies, accounting, tax, communications and employment exists, regardless of cloud or any other computing environment. In the minority of cases where (for example) data may not be stored outside of the country’s borders, the enterprise can elect to use a private cloud or local service provider.

What is Cloud?

In order to set context to the cloud discussion, it is worth defining what cloud computing is for a simple reason, that it is relatively a new business model in the computing world.

After reviewing literature, I came across some information which refered to a widely recognised definition of cloud computing by the NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology).
This institute defines cloud computing as...

A model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.

FIVE KEY CHARACTERISTICS

There are five key characteristics highlighted by the above definition...

1. on-demand self-service
2. broad network access
3. resource pooling
4. rapid elasticity or expansion
5. measured service.

Let us explore these characteristics in detail for a meaningful discussion about cloud:

• On-demand Self-Service - A consumer can unilaterally provision computing capabilities with each service provider such as server time and network storage as and when needed automatically without any human interaction.

• Broad Network Access -  Capabilities are available over the network and accessed through standard mechanisms that promote use by heterogeneous thin or thick client platforms (e.g., mobile phones, tablets, laptops, and workstations).

• Resource Pooling - The provider’s computing resources are pooled to serve multiple consumers using a multi-tenant model, with different physical and virtual resources dynamically assigned and reassigned according to consumer demand. There is a sense of location independence in that, the customer generally has no control or knowledge over the exact location of the provided resources but may be able to specify location at a higher level of abstraction (e.g., country, state, or datacentre). Examples of resources include storage, processing, memory, and network bandwidth..

• Rapid Elasticity - Capabilities can be elastically provisioned and released, in some cases automatically, to scale rapidly outward and inward commensurate with demand. To the consumer, the capabilities available for provisioning often appears to be unlimited and can be appropriated in any quantity at any time.

• Measured Service - Cloud systems automatically control and optimize resource use by leveraging a metering capability at some level of abstraction appropriate to the type of service (e.g., storage, processing, bandwidth, and active user accounts). Resource usage can be monitored, controlled, and reported, providing transparency for both the provider and consumer of the utilized service.