Bill H's Library tagged Cloud-computing →  View Popular

Key Findings



• Emerging cloud offerings can deliver immediate reduction in capital expenditures, but for organizations with large data centers, they may not offer long-term cost savings over internal deployments.
• Utility hosting services can deliver cost savings of up to 20%, compared to traditional hosting services.
• Virtual data center hosting offers a "private cloud" — a self-provisioned virtualized environment. For an organization which does not have an equivalent internal service, this can be a cost-effective alternative for a test and development environment.
• Because cloud solutions derive their cost-effectiveness from standardization and automation, and are usually purchased online with a credit card, businesses will usually not be able to negotiate custom contracts. A buyer will have to live with the service, and its risks, as it is.
• Consider a hosted or cloud offering if you are short on capital but need infrastructure now.
• There are many vendors and tremendous variance in the available solutions. There's much more to this market than Amazon, Google and Microsoft. You should conduct a thorough search to find the solution that's right for you.
• Ensure that there is governance in place for all uses of these solutions. Self-service does not remove the need for the management of this form of IT infrastructure.

Key Findings




• ICT innovations will come increasingly from around the globe, and the
  concept of "country of origin" will become irrelevant by 2015.
  
• Emerging megavendors will challenge the dominant vendors in many sectors of
  ICT.
  
• Aging populations in the developed world, coupled with the large "young"
  populations in these areas, will strongly influence resource supply and dynamics
  globally.
  
• There is an increasing need to focus on the location and scale of ICT
  investments in emerging markets.
• Assess the business impact of globalization on your enterprise. This can
  provide leading-edge indicators of the impact of globalization on your firm's IT
  initiatives and strategies.
  
• Focus on developing organizational skills and capabilities to increasingly
  leverage a global IT resource pool and to bring innovation into the enterprise.
  
• Avoid tactical and cost-saving-focused approaches to dealing with emerging
  market capabilities, because these will not be sustainable. Instead, define a
  more strategic, holistic and all-encompassing view of the value your enterprise
  can derive from emerging-market engagements.

The paper outlines 10 obstacles to cloud computing:

1. Availability of service

2. Data lock-in

3. Data confidentiality and auditability

4. Data transfer bottlenecks

5. Performance unpredictability

6. Scalable storage

7. Bugs in large distributed systems

8. Scaling quickly

9. Reputation fate sharing

10. Software licensing