By Ram Kumar and Muhammad Usman
A CLOUD is a powerful combination of cloud computing, networking, storage, management solutions, and business applications that facilitate a new generation of IT and consumer services. These services are available on demand and are delivered economically without compromising security or functionality. Instead of moving to a single cloud, we are moving to an interconnected “world of many clouds”. This will give people access to cloud services any time, on any device, anywhere in the world.
Solving todays biggest business and technology challenges requires an approach that fully integrates the three pillars of cloud computing – applications and services, data centers, and networks. This approach will need to keep pace with changing market trends, which require greater elasticity, agility, and speed to support evolution in weeks or months, not years.
To take full advantage of cloud computing, Engineer needs to have different certifications on cloud computing to achieve greater business value through the improved cost-savings and productivity that cloud services offer.
The idea of computing utility dates back to the 1960s. Promoters of the cloud computing declare that this is the future of computing. International Data Corporation, a trusted source of IT trends, has predicted that business IT spending on cloud services will increase from $16 billion last year to $42 billion by 2012. As the world-wide IT industry embraces this paradigm shift in computing, a compelling question arises i.e., how will it affect the Pakistani Enterprise?
Cloud computing in its minimum form of web applications has long been making inroads into the Pakistani consumer computing habits. Hotmail, Gmail, Facebook, Orkut, Naseeb, Webex, Skype, Yahoo, YouTube, Vimeo and MSN are all examples of computing applications that harness remote computing power – or in the cloud computing language – these applications reside and operate in the cloud. As of December 9, Pakistan had close to 1.4 million Facebook users and 1.7 million Yahoo users.
Web applications have also been making deep penetrations into the business operations of the Pakistani Enterprise. For example, Rozee.pk recruiting web-service, with more than 25000 registered employers and 1.4 million prospective employees, has fundamentally changed the recruiting function of a Pakistani Enterprise. Services such as Google maps, bastee.com, lahorerealestate.com and pakwheels.com have been gradually defining new rules for the Pakistani Automotive and Real Estate industry.
The largest Pakistani distant learning institute, Virtual University uses “YouTube” as a platform to deliver classroom lectures, while its students use Gmail and Google Talk to communicate with peers. Cloud computing in its classic form enables flexible on-demand provisioning of computing resources as per the IT needs of any enterprise.
These computing resources include raw computing power, computing applications and IT services. The fundamental drivers for the adoption of cloud services are their economic benefits and the ease of management. Users avoid IT capital expenditure and subscribe to the computing resources just like they subscribe to broadband services. The quality of service of these computing resources is guaranteed by the contractual service level agreements between the consumers and the service providers.
While information technology takes its rightful place as the nervous system of a successful Pakistani Enterprise, the CIO needs to consider the economic and operational benefits of cloud services alternative whilst making new IT investments. By avoiding large capex and using cloud services, CIOs can use limited IT budgets for various important IT initiatives when faced with limited IT funds.
The following concrete example will make the point more clear. Email has become central to the Pakistani Enterprise workflow. When an enterprise adopts hosted email, they avoid the cost of procuring email servers, hiring trained IT staff, arranging for standby power (generators/ups), providing air conditioning for the equipment and arranging for network and physical security. Some of these benefits are more relevant to the Pakistani Enterprise as power-outages are frequent and leakage of capital assets is common. Most importantly, cloud based email services can be procured as per the requirements of the enterprise. For example, the number of mailboxes in a hosted email solution and the storage for each mailbox can be bought from the service provider according to enterprise needs. Such precise procurement of IT resources based on the enterprise needs underlines the importance of cloud computing services within limited IT funds.
In the present unstable times, Cloud services provide an ideal alternative for providing disaster recovery and business continuity to a resilient Pakistani Enterprise. With cloud services, hot backup of the primary business critical applications can be readily made available instantaneously in case of a disaster. With technologies such as virtualization and synchronous replication, important information assets of an enterprise can be made secure. Pakistani enterprises can lower their risk profile without incurring large capital expenditures by using disaster recovery cloud services.
Cloud services enable innovation for Pakistans technology sector. While still in its infancy, Pakistani software start-ups develop rich set of applications, such as database, iPhone games and web services. They can wisely control the burn rate of their limited financial funds by avoiding capex and using cloud computing resources.
Cloud Computing is now being integrated in Semester courses in Indian universities whereas students of Pakistan dont know about the Cloud. If you visit the popular tech-focused job site Dice.com and search for cloud computing jobs, youll get more than 3,800 hits. According to Alice Hill, Managing Director of Dice.com, thats up 72 per cent last year.
Basically, cloud is a segment of the jobs market that is going gangbusters.
The writers are the students of Telecommunication Engineering in Sir Syed University Of Engineering and Technology, Karachi.