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Q1 Why Is the Cloud the Future for Most Organizations? 209

Both cloud vendors and electrical utilities benefit from economies of scale. According to
this principle, the average cost of production decreases as the size of the operation increases.
Major cloud vendors operate enormous Web farms. Figure 6-2 shows the building that contains
the computers in the Web farm that Apple constructed in 2011 to support its iCloud offering.
1
This billion-dollar facility contains more than 500,000 square feet. Amazon.com, IBM, Google,
Microsoft, Oracle, and other large companies each operate several similar farms worldwide.

Over the Internet
Finally, with the cloud, the resources are accessed over the Internet. “Big deal,” you’re saying.
“I use the Internet all the time.” Well, think about that for a minute. AllRoad Parts has contracted
with the cloud vendor for a maximum response time; the cloud vendor adds servers as needed
to meet that requirement. As stated, the cloud vendor may be provisioning, nearly instanta-
neously, servers all over the world. How does it do that? And not for just one customer, like
AllRoad Parts, but for thousands?
In the old days, for such interorganizational processing to occur, developers from AllRoad
Parts had to meet with developers from the cloud vendor and design an interface. “Our pro-
grams will do this, providing this data, and we want your programs to do that, in response,
sending us this other data back.” Such meetings took days and were expensive and error-prone.
Given the design, the developers then returned home to write code to meet the agreed-on inter-
face design, which may not have been understood in the same way by all parties.
It was a long, slow, expensive, and prone-to-failure process. If organizations had to do that
today, cloud provisioning would be unaffordable and infeasible.
Instead, the computer industry settled on a set of standard ways of requesting and receiv-
ing services over the Internet. You will learn about some of these standards in Q3. For now, just
realize those standards enable computers that have never “met” before to organize a dizzying,
worldwide dance to deliver and process content to users on PCs, iPads, Google phones, Xboxes,
and even exercise equipment in a tenth of second or less. It is absolutely fascinating and gor-
geous technology! Unfortunately, you will have the opportunity to learn only a few basic terms

Figure 6-2
Apple Data Center in Maiden, NC
Source: Google Earth

1 Patrick Thibodeau, “Apple, Google, Facebook Turn N.C. into Data Center Hub,” Computerworld, June 3, 2011,
www.computerworld.com/s/article/9217259/Apple_Google_Facebook_turn_N.C._into_data_center_hub.