Page 1 - Customer context for Cloud Computing

INTRODUCTION

The IT marketplace is in transition: from a capital economy, where organizations own and operate
their IT systems, to a service-based economy, where they have the option to purchase the
equivalent IT capability — be it raw storage or computing power, collaboration tools or specialized
business processes — from an external provider, "as a service”, commonly referred to as “Cloud
Computing”.

Cloud Computing is intensely disruptive to the established IT marketplace and according to industry
analysts is growing much faster than the traditional IT markets – due in part to the much-touted
benefits of “consumption-based” charging, avoidance of capital investment and immediacy of
service.

However, despite these attractions, adopting Cloud Computing is not without its challenges – both
the business and to IT – and the purpose of this White Paper is to explore the customer context for
Cloud Computing in order for Cloud Service Providers to align their sales messages and process with
buyer requirements and concerns and so address upfront the challenges that could otherwise
impede successful adoption.

 a huge body of material has been published about Cloud Computing, much of it being
“promotional” in nature. It is therefore necessary to adopt a common definition for Cloud
Computing that can form the basis of effective dialogue and service evaluation/selection. The
reader of this White Paper should be familiar with the topic of “Consumption Economics” which is
fundamental to the “as-a-Service” nature of Cloud Computing business models, in order to fully
appreciate the challenges and opportunities that this phenomena presents.

DEFINING CLOUD COMPUTING

The concept of Cloud Computing extends outsourcing and hosting models - in which a third

party operates an IT environment on behalf of a customer - but the Cloud is

differentiated from what is delivered by traditional external service providers by a
number of key attributes.

Two draft definitions of Cloud emerged in 2008/9 and have since been formalised and are in

common usage: the IT Analyst firm Gartner states: “(Cloud is) a style of computing where

scalable and elastic IT-related capabilities are provided ‘as a service’ to customers using Internet

technologies”, whereas NIST (National Institute of

Standards and Technology) in the USA defines Cloud

Computing in the following manner: “Cloud computing is

a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand

network access to a shared pool of configurable

computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage,

applications, and services) that can be rapidly A Cloud Computing Taxonomy

provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction. This cloud

model is composed of five essential characteristics, three service models, and four deployment

models”.

Although the NIST definition is somewhat more prescriptive, both definitions are fundamentally
similar and both rely on the same 5 definitional attributes:

Author: Mike Spink Cloud Computing – The Customer Context Page 1 of 7
Version 2.0 (final) A White Paper for Cisco by Innovise ESM Spring 2015