46 ITadviser Autumn 2009
cloud computing
The buzz surrounding Cloud
Computing has reached an all time
high thanks to intense media interest and
the marketing efforts of big brands such
as Amazon and Google. According to IDC,
growth in Cloud Computing is set to triple
to �29.5 billion in the next three years1
.
Although there remains confusion over
what is meant by `cloud', Gartner's
definition of Cloud Computing as a
system where massively scalable IT
capabilities are delivered as a service2
is
accepted by most. IT-as-a-Service offers
huge advantages to enterprise-level
customers that want the option of
significant computing power on tap
without having to buy expensive
supercomputers. The ability to
dynamically grow or shrink compute
power on demand by paying for it on a
usage basis is particularly attractive
given the current economic climate and
pressures on organisations to do more
with less. Yet despite all the talk around
Cloud Computing and the benefits it
offers, the technology has not arrived like
a bolt from the blue. Instead, it is the
result of an evolutionary process that
started over 20 years ago, in part with
technology known as grid computing,
and there is still some way to go before we
see widespread adoption of cloud.
The evolution of grid
The term grid computing first emerged in
the mid-1980s after scientific
organisations and government
laboratories began to require greater
computational power. The technology
allows users to run complex, often process
or data intensive applications on clusters
of commodity servers. It offers
organisations a greater level of flexibility
and reliability by creating a system of
shared resources that are able to compute
large or complex tasks in a fraction of the
time that a single computer would take by
distributing the calculations across
hundreds or thousands of CPUs. From
humble beginnings in research labs, the
technology accounting for �8.1 billion in
sales in 20073
is now widely adopted for
commercial use across all industry sectors
including financial services,
manufacturing, life sciences, oil and gas,
government and education. Whether it be
F1 teams using the technology to increase
the amount of aerodynamic testing they
are able to complete or pharmaceutical
companies using it to go to market with
The journey from
Computing
Randy Clark of Platform Computing tracks the
evolution of cloud enabling software from its
origins in grid and high performance computing.
new drugs faster than before, the benefits
of harnessing the power of shared IT
resources are now widely recognised.
In its infancy organisations
adopted a departmental
approach to sharing their
resources but this has changed in
recent years with
enterprises taking
more of a
holistic
view of their IT
infrastructure. This
approach involves identifying the
processing power across an organisation
and pooling it so it can be deployed where
it is needed most. The set-up is often
referred to as a shared resource or utility
computing model and involves separate
lines of business paying for usage, rather
than ownership, to access computing
resources for their applications. This
stage has required a significant
philosophical shift as users are required
to share resources that they have
traditionally always owned and
controlled. IT departments have also had
to adapt as they extend beyond just
running the corporate network and adopt
the responsibilities of a running
computing service. Despite this,
according to IDC, sharing is no longer
seen as a dirty word and taking a utility
model and applying it across an
organisation is now seen as prudent.4
Issues impacting the
adoption of cloud
It's not surprising that increasing
numbers of organisations today are
looking forward to the next stage � Cloud
Computing. The concept of using the web
as a means of delivering a service has

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