Buzzword bingo!

Ian Catlin - 21 April 2010

"Cloud" - it's the current buzzword in IT, but what does it actually mean for IT departments and the businesses they serve?

Are you sitting comfortably? Yes? Then let me tell you a story...

Many years ago, when I was just starting out in the technology industry, we worked on computer terminals. Somewhere, deep in dark room, the computer (Mainframe or Mini) was humming away to itself - or more likely, humming away to it's attendant operators that would fuss around like worker bees attending their queen... All my data was safe "somewhere" and if I ever made a mistake and deleted something I shouldn't, the operators would get it back for me, usually at the cost of filling in a form and perhaps a bar of chocolate to speed things along...

Fast forward a few years and we all had PCs and all that freedom! Of course we eventually realised that we had lost something - that being the safety net of the centralised computer department and its regular backup... So, we all started buying "departmental" servers - we could copy our data there and keep it safe. Some of us even decided to start buying online backup services to make sure we didn't loose our data and around this time the first "cloud" buzzword was born - SaaS "Software as a Service".

Over the next few years thousands of servers sprang up around companies all over the world, so many in fact that eventually someone realised that if we kept going we would end up with a ratio of 1:1 servers to staff, which was bonkers, especially now that we had all been told that we needed to save electricity to save the planet... This gave rise to the next buzzword of the "cloud" - Virtualisation (or "Virtualization" if you're from the USA). It didn't take too long for the next step - if we're going to virtualise servers, why not virtualise the whole system and allow IT teams to buy virtual servers as and when they need? This gave is IaaS - "Infrastructure as a Service". Wait, there's more... Taking it another small step forward and we can give IT teams PaaS - "Platform as a Service". But what if we need people to do some stuff that computers can't? (Speech to text services spring to mind) well then we can have HuaaS - "Humans as a Service" !

So, what have we got?

IaaS = Infrastructure as a Service. Full access and control of a virtual system without need to access or host bare metal. Eg Amazon EC2
PaaS = Platform as a Service. An integrated application runtime and development environment. Target audience is developers. Similar to above but with no admin overheads. Eg Google App engine, Amazon simple Db.
SaaS = Software as a Service. Enterprise software consumed as utility via the browser. Eg Saleforce.com, Google Docs etc
HuaaS = Humans as a Service. "Crowdsourcing". Eg Amazon Mechanical Turk

(definitions courtesy of PC Pro Magazine)

So now what do I think it all means for IT? I think it means choice and lots of it. Now IT departments can take their business processes and use all these new tools to provide better services for their business. Ultimately, none of these techniques and services are an answer in themselves and in fact IT departments should guard against adopting any of them just because they're the latest thing...

But what else? Well, the explosion of these cloud services is driving massive demand from consumers, businesses and even network providers. It's all change folks! Networks need to evolve to survive this change and it's becoming evident that intelligence is becoming key - intelligence to manage the demand, be able to prioritise (and get paid for!) critical traffic and maximise return on investment.

What does "Cloud" mean to me? Well, it's just like that mainframe all those years ago...

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