Understanding the “Cloud” and What it Can Do for Your Business

If you ask 10 people to define what the “Cloud” is, you’ll get 10 different answers – even if you include seasoned IT professionals in your survey. Most likely, each answer will be at least partly correct. To shed some light on what the cloud is and how it can impact your business, I will write a series of blogs that I hope you will find informative and useful.

I’m Mohammed Ourdane and, as CTO for Cloud Computing at P&T Luxembourg, I’m 100% focused on “Cloud” solutions, issues and challenges. I’d like to start this series by giving you my definition of what the “Cloud” is. Then, in future blogs, I’ll go into details about its components and how it adds business value.

I may surprise many of you by saying that you shouldn’t think of the “Cloud” from a technical point of view. There is plenty of technology behind it, but it is basically a business orientation. It extends a company’s internal IT through outsourcing. As such, it adds business value by enabling companies to focus on their core business. It also saves money by eliminating the need for capital expenditure to build IT infrastructure and by reducing operating expenses since many companies share this infrastructure.

In the old paradigm, a company’s internal IT is responsible for building and managing the infrastructure, which includes storage, networks, telecommunications and software. But recently, and very quickly, the complexity of this task has increased exponentially as businesses need to interact with customers and employees anywhere, anytime, through any device. IT enables business, and if there is a failure such as email going down, a company is in trouble.

The “Cloud” solves this problem by making it easy for companies to outsource infrastructure and management to service providers that have mastered this complexity. With data storage and transport, computing and software managed in the “Cloud,” internal IT can focus on managing information and helping a company derive full value from its knowledge assets. This is how the “Cloud” makes it possible for IT to add real business value.

This “Infrastructure as a Service” is a component of the “Cloud” that extends a company’s IT capacity or, if it is a new company, it will deliver the capacity and structure it wants. No longer will IT have to manage data in a datacenter, for example. But I want to emphasize that a good “Cloud” service provider will maintain the same IT structure and logic as currently employed. It should be managed exactly as it would have been done in-house. This flexibility, and willingness to put the time in to understand a client’s IT logic, is an important point of differentiation between companies that provide cloud services.

I’m at the end of the first blog and realize I haven’t yet completed my definition of the “Cloud.” So in my next blog, I’ll continue by talking about pricing, consolidation, virtualisation, mutualisation and a lot more. I’d also like to know how you define the “Cloud.” Please comment and tell me.