Inside the cloud

IT infrastructure services company, Terremark, is at the heart of the cloud computing evolution

There has been a fair amount of hype around cloud computing. Indeed, it seems the technology has been embraced so fast that few realise it’s not quite as simple as it seems. In part this is the fault of the nomenclature: cloud computing gets its name from diagrams previously used to depict the internet – it’s little wonder people often erroneously equate the two. Kurt Glazemakers, CTO Europe at IT infrastructure services company, Terremark, takes us through the status quo of cloud computing: how their business is a part of this whole evolution, and what remains to be done to complete the cloud.

The cloud revealed

Cloud computing—it has become known as the new IT paradigm whereby computing resources are provided via the internet on an on-demand basis, not unlike electricity or water supplied by utility companies. But unfortunately that vision is today still an over-simplification of today’s IT infrastructure. In order to understand cloud computing, it is useful to make a distinction between three different categories of cloud services.

Probably the best known category is software as a service (SaaS). This is a model of software deployment via the internet (for example, Salesforce.com), which is gradually beginning to change the way that businesses manage their applications. As opposed to developing or buying business software, to be installed on your own servers, with SaaS your end users need only browse applications on a website, with utilisation on a ‘service on demand’ basis.

For businesses requiring the ability to customise these applications, or build their own, there’s the middle tier of cloud computing: platform as a service (PaaS). Here virtual facilities are provided to support the complete lifecycle of both building and delivering SaaS applications (examples here are Google app engine or Microsoft Azure).

Finally, cloud computing can also refer to infrastructure as a service (IaaS): a platform virtualisation environment. Instead of the costly purchase of servers, software, network infrastructure and all the IT support that goes with it, clients rent these resources as fully outsourced services. Similar to the SaaS model, these services are typically billed in a ‘utility computing’ fashion, with costing based on the amount of resources used – a direct reflection on the level of activity. This virtual private server offering is where Terremark comes into the picture.