Get your head above the cloud

‘Cloud’, like ‘Digital’, has been a popular tech buzzword for a few years. And like the latter, the Cloud means different things to different people. People incorrectly ask, “Isn’t Google the Cloud?”, but the correct question would be, “Is Google on the Cloud?” It’s like believing that a bicycle is fuel, and asking the question, “How many liters of bicycle have you put in your car?”

Read the wikipedia definition of cloud here. If you understood that definition, skip this article and look no further. Just in case you did not, consider this my attempt to explain cloud in a way that benefits both tech as well as non-tech readers, specifically those who interact with their organizations’ IT functions.

Part I: Understanding IT with a simple analogy

Think of IT applications as families, and IT infrastructure as the houses these families live in. Like a family, an IT application can be big or small. And just as a family needs a house to live in, an IT application needs the right infrastructure as its host. A house is a combination of rooms, electricals, plumbing, while an IT Infrastructure is a combination of computing, data storage, networks, and many other things.

Let’s take this analogy forward. Just as housing has evolved over hundreds of years, IT infrastructure has also advanced immensely over the past few decades. There was a time when, if a family needed a house, they would need to buy land and construct a single-storey home on it. Keep that ‘single storey’ bit in mind -- it’ll be important later!

Graphic:IT infrastructure mirrors housing infrastructure in many ways

In the past, every IT application needing infrastructure would be installed on one piece of hardware purchased by one organization. This ‘one-by-one’ method is hopelessly outdated by today’s standards, and any organization that still does this will be stuck in the ‘stone age’ of computing.

Fortunately, a game-changer arrived in both the housing and computing industries -- multi-storey buildings and virtualization respectively. Today, you can build multiple floors on the same piece of land, and thus make better use of it. Similarly, with the advent of virtualization, virtual hosts can be built on a single piece of hardware. Organizations can now use a common piece of IT equipment to host multiple applications, just as how several families can dwell on different floors of a house, on the same plot of land.

The similarities don’t end there. Through virtualization, applications share computing power, memory, and other resources across various hosts, much in the same way multi-storey houses share water and electricity supplies. Just as one family doesn’t use all the water or electricity at any given time and yet these services remain unlimited to all families, applications seldom require huge amounts of memory or processing for long periods of time. Hence, by sharing such services, one makes more efficient use of the shared resources.

Graphic : Virtualization lets you share computing power and memory, across hosts            

At this point, you might be wondering, “what has this got to do with the Cloud?” Trust me, we’re getting there.

Over a period of time, high-rise complexes came into being based on the principle of multi-storey housing, but with several added advantages, such as:

• An expansive scale of operations, incorporating multi-storey towers
• Amenities such as maintenance teams, an administrative office, and shared swimming pools and/or club-houses
• Multiple floors on a single piece of land

The Cloud is the equivalent of that same high-rise apartment complex. It is multiple pieces of hardware interconnected to host several IT applications at the same time. It also comes with amenities such as:

• A management layer to manage the hosts
• A provisioning layer to provision hosts to IT applications
• Shared amenities such as network and storage pools

A large, well-built Cloud can host several hundred IT applications in the same way a good apartment complex can house several hundred families.

 Graphic : The evolution of IT infrastructure

So far, IT Infrastructure has evolved from a single-storey house (bare metal), to multi-storey houses (virtualization), and finally to high-rise apartment complexes (the Cloud.) The Cloud isn’t the Internet or Google -- it’s the outcome of the architectural principle of virtualization!

Part II: The many shapes and sizes of the Cloud

A lot of people today think of the Cloud as solely being ‘Public’, with massive amounts of infrastructure and services available over the Internet for individuals and enterprises. However, this couldn’t be further from the truth.

If an organization houses its employees and their families in exclusive apartments, it is a Private Residential Complex. Similarly, if a cloud-based IT Infrastructure is meant for exclusive use by an organization’s IT applications, it is the organization’s Private Cloud. Do note that Private and Public Clouds have nothing to do with ownership, but rather with exclusivity and sharing. Private Clouds are exclusively used by businesses, while Public Clouds are available to one and all.

A Hybrid Cloud is formed when an organization hosts a few applications on a Public Cloud, and others on a Private one, providing a secure connection between the two.

So, bear in mind that the term ‘Cloud’ is an architectural principle enabling IT hardware and software to be made available in Public, Private, and Hybrid configurations.

A Multitude of services

Just as high-rise buildings have spawned many real estate models such as commercial buildings, residential buildings, and hospitals, the Cloud offers us many types of data usage. Let’s look at some of them, shall we?

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) entails renting hardware with an operating system, and is like renting an unfurnished apartment that you would then decorate yourself. Platform as a Service (PaaS) means renting platforms and databases and the hardware they’re run on, much like renting a furnished apartment, which is ready to move in. Software as a Service (SaaS) gives you the hardware, platform, and IT application, and is a lot like living in a serviced apartment. In this model, one can rent services such as CRM, email suites, and ERP. Other services made possible by the Cloud include Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS), Backup as a Service (BaaS), and Desktop as a Service (DaaS), with BaaS and DaaS enabled through virtual desktops sitting on a Cloud 

Part III: Why is the Cloud such a big deal?

Well, imagine an urban city like New York, Paris, London, or Mumbai without its signature high-rise buildings. Can you, really?

With people migrating to the city in droves, land became precious, and the only way to accommodate the growing population was to go vertical. We are now experiencing a similar expansion in digitization. If IT organizations continue to use one piece of hardware for each IT application, their data centers will occupy more office space than their employees. This will make digitization more expensive and thus deter its progress. This is why the utilization of IT assets -- exactly like the utilization of land today -- has increased manifold.

Urbanization may be possible without high-rises, but it would be severely limited by the availability and cost of land. Similarly, the pace of digitization would slow down if IT remains in the ‘bare metal’ age.

Companies That Changed the Cloud Game

The company that started the virtualization game is VMWare, at least they are the ones that I first came to know about. The company that has definitively changed the game with cloud is Amazon. Through its Cloud business, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has allowed enterprises to rent hardware, platforms, software, and storage in Private or Public mode.

Apple soon followed suit with iCloud, which is built to provide a common platform just for Apple users to save data and exchange messages. Google Cloud and Mi Cloud now offer the same to their respective users.

Today, the Cloud has brought with it the concept of ‘as a service’, which is nothing but a subscription model to hardware or software. You can now simply subscribe to or unsubscribe from the products or services you need, instead of buying them directly.

For those who are unfamiliar with this subscription model, consider this -- imagine that you were a small business with a finite amount of capital. Would you buy an office or rent it? Chances are, you would do the latter.

The same question can be raised about IT today. Without the Cloud, IT startups and entrepreneurs would be forced to buy IT hardware and software. Imagine the state of their business then!

Conclusion

The Future of the Cloud

The Cloud has been a key enabler for new businesses, and has boosted the innovation and speed of digitization. It will now give rise to the age of SaaS providers, where software will be made available by small and big players alike. The Cloud will enable small businesses that previously couldn’t afford CRM to rent software through subscription models. What’s more, it will also lower the cost of experimentation, letting ailing businesses or ideas fail fast and fail cheap. Add to that the Cloud’s elasticity of supply, and its ability to spawn hardware on demand in seconds, and you have a recipe for seamless business!

Now that you understand cloud better, you would know that almost everything that you touch digitally (including this article on LinkedIn), has been made possible in some way because of cloud.Yes, there are lingering questions on the Cloud that we can talk about -- security, ownership of data, regulation, etc. And we will certainly talk about them another time!

I thank Max Life Insurance for inspiring me to share such insights and being an organization that constantly strives to remain in the forefront of technology. I also thank Sairaj Kamath, Neha Kripalani and Sasha Arora from Pink Lemonade, who added ‘soul’ to this article.