Everyone's Heads in the Cloud

Image via WikipediaThese days it seems as if everyone wants to be in "the cloud". This term is ambiguous at best, as the meaning and ultimate usage of such a system can vary widely. I believe a corporate deployment of cloud computing harnesses resources which are already in place and efficiently allocates these resources across various applications. These resources can be data or processing cycles. 

On the other hand, the reliance on a third party to completely outsource the storage of data or processing can be unreliable and dangerous in certain situations. Specifically, the Patriot Act allows the government access to hosted data service providers without their clients knowledge. The ability to look at private corporate data stored on that network, therefore, would compromise the integrity of a corporation. Similarly, outsourcing any processing lends the corporation to higher IT liability and bandwidth concerns.

Virtualization of a corporation allows for the best of both worlds, a reliable and efficiently run IT environment. However, in addition to this environment, IT folks should be sure that the mission critical software they run are architect in a manner to take full advantage of this.

GRID architecture allows software to use hardware with high availability, the ability to scale, and a consistent fail-over system. In a follow-up post I will go into a little more detail on what GRID architecture entails.