As cloud computing begins to move beyond hype and into early mainstream adoption, analyst Gartner says look for five key pointers for suitability. "Providers of cloud services and potential consumers of cloud services must examine the attributes of cloud computing to determine whether their services will deliver the expected outcomes," explains Daryl Plummer, managing vice president and chief Gartner Fellow.
"If a service is not scalable and elastic, then it may not be shareable enough. If it is not metered by use, then it may not allow for flexible pricing. Support for more of the attributes opens the door to a great value proposition, and greater flexibility and potential cost reduction."
He suggests evaluating your potential cloud solutions and services against five key attributes to assess suitability.
1. Service-based: Gartner makes the point that consumer concerns are abstracted from provider concerns through service interfaces that hide the implementation details and enable a completely automated response. A service might be considered 'ready to use' or 'off the shelf' if designed to serve your specific needs. Look for service levels and IT outcomes – availability, response time, performance versus price, and clear and predefined operational processes – rather than technology and its capabilities.
2. Scalable and elastic: Check that the service can scale capacity up or down as required and with the automation speed required – which may be seconds for some services and hours for others. Gartner makes the point that elasticity is a trait of shared pools of resources, while scalability is a feature of the underlying infrastructure and software platforms – but there's also the issue of economic model.
3. Shared: Services share a pool of resources to build economies of scale, enabling IT resources to be used at maximum efficiency. So check the underlying infrastructure, software or platforms.
4. Metered by use: Here, services are tracked by usage metrics to enable multiple payment models. These may include pay-as-you go plans, subscriptions, fixed plans and even free plans. The implied payment plans will be based on usage, not on the cost of the equipment, and may be in terms of hours, data transfers etc.
5. Uses Internet technologies: Services are delivered using Internet identifiers, formats and protocols, such as URLs, HTTP, IP and representational state transfer Web-orientated architecture. Many examples of Web technology exist as the foundation for Internet-based services.
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