IBM Global Services

April 2009

Cloud computing: defined and demystified

Explore public, private and hybrid cloud approaches to help
accelerate innovative business solutions
Cloud computing: defined and demystified
Page 2

Executive summary
Contents

Predicted to transform IT over the next decade, cloud computing is

2 Executive summary an emerging trend that provides rapid access to dynamically scalable
2 Introduction and virtualized IT resources. IBM is fully embracing the potential of all
3 Overview of cloud computing types of cloud-based solutions rooted in industry-based standards:
4 Defining cloud computing Our goal is to collaborate with organizations around the world to help
5 Benefits of cloud computing create dynamic IT infrastructures through virtualization technologies and
7 Types of clouds new cloud management techniques that enable a simplified “anywhere,
8 Public clouds anytime” self-service approach for the delivery and consumption of
9 Private clouds IT services. Because they provision and allocate services on demand,
10 Hybrid clouds cloud-based technologies can provide unlimited scalability and a higher-
11 Workload considerations for cloud quality, more efficient infrastructure while simultaneously fostering rapid
implementation options innovation. In this white paper, the term cloud computing is defined, along
11 Workloads that can take advantage with the distinguishing attributes of the types of cloud deployments, their
of public clouds advantages and disadvantages, and the approach that best aligns with
12 Workloads more appropriate for the needs of your enterprise.
private clouds
12 Forecast: The future of cloud Introduction
computing
13 Implementing a cloud computing While the concept of cloud computing becomes more mainstream
solution within the IT universe, its precise definition—and potential application
14 For more information —remains ambiguous for many people. Cloud computing is still an
emerging technology that will continue to evolve over the next few years,
so understanding its precise meaning will probably depend on who is
using the term and in what way. The purpose of this white paper is to
define and clarify cloud computing from IBM’s perspective, focusing
on the various ways it can be deployed—from public to private to hybrid
clouds—while covering the potential technical and business implications
of each in a vendor-agnostic way. With a clear understanding of how each
type of cloud deployment is set up and the advantages and disadvantages
of each as they relate to your enterprise, you are more fully equipped to
make informed decisions about which cloud computing approach is most
appropriate for your enterprise.
Cloud computing: defined and demystified
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Overview of cloud computing

Cloud computing is a simplified way to deliver IT services to your business,

allowing you to choose from a menu of virtualized applications, software,
hardware, and networking services that are housed in an Internet “cloud,”
either owned privately by an enterprise or owned, hosted, and managed
by a third-party service provider. Unlike a traditional corporate client-
server data center where you own and actively manage the infrastructure
and its resources, a public cloud computing model enables you to “lease”
these resources. Depending on the pricing agreement, you can pay
a monthly fee (similar to a subscription) or pay for services as you use
them, both options potentially freeing you from the large capital expenses
typically associated with developing innovative technology solutions. A
private cloud is, or provides access to, a highly virtualized data center
that allows your IT staff to provision services and capacity to internal end
users on a self-service basis while automating management tasks and
using a chargeback billing system to lines of business. The services in
a cloud computing model are highly scalable, so you can flexibly adapt
to changing business requirements by easily adding new services or
removing those you no longer need.

Public clouds
(provider - Internet) Private clouds
Hybrid clouds (data center - Intranet)
(public and private)

“Services” delivered as a service

Applications, processes and information as a service

Software platforms as a service

(optimized middleware – application servers,
database servers, portal servers)

Infrastructure as a service
(virtualized servers, storage, networking)

Figure 1. Cloud computing deployments and services

Cloud computing: defined and demystified
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Defining cloud computing

Cloud computing is a smart acquisition and delivery model that provides

continuous access and availability to computing services and IT resources
from any location, using virtually any device. A self-service approach
allows consumers to acquire services as needed, for as long as they need
them, through the Internet or an intranet, while making the technology
beyond the user device almost invisible. As a result, this service delivery
model is highly scalable and can help to rapidly develop, deploy and
deliver services in a simplified way to cost-effectively support innovative
business solutions.

So how exactly does it work? The user accesses the cloud to select
the desired consumer or business products, services or solutions,
which are delivered and consumed in real time using the Internet or
Internet-based technology. Depending on your needs, the cloud can
provide access to interoperable and interchangeable software or
hardware components, networking capabilities as well as management
and monitoring capabilities.

Cloud computing provides:

• Standardized, consumable, Web-based deliverable services

• Elastic scaling
• Flexible pricing
• Metering and billing capability
• Advanced virtualization
• Rapid provisioning of resources

A cloud computing platform combines the modular components of a

service-oriented architecture and an Internet protocol-based convergence
of networks and devices within a high-performance pool of virtualized
computer hardware and software resources. With easy access to an easy-
to-use service request catalog that hides the complexity of the underlying
infrastructure, the end user is able to select and access standardized,
Cloud computing: defined and demystified
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preconfigured and pretested solutions, services and resources. Delivered

at a granular level of billing and metering, this workload standardization
can help measure, monitor and lower the cost of your services while
easing complexity of your IT infrastructure.

This on demand approach allows for greater scalability and enables your
organization to take advantage of innovative technology, without having to
spend time, resources and money on development and implementation to
provide similar services to the business users.

Benefits of cloud computing

Cloud computing implementations are designed for rapid delivery of

computing resources, providing a cost-efficient model for provisioning
processes, applications and services while making IT management
easier and more responsive to the needs of the business. Services
(resources and applications) are made available by highly efficient,
virtualized compute resources that can be rapidly scaled up and down
in a flexible yet secure way to deliver a high quality of service. Business
or consumer services—from computation services, storage services,
networking services, whatever is needed—are rapidly delivered and
made available dynamically, in an “on demand,” simplified way, regardless
of the user’s location or type of device. With this model comes unbounded
scale, differentiated quality, and a user focus designed to foster rapid,
innovation that enables organizations to quickly and cost-effectively
deploy new solutions for use inside and outside the company—creating
greater business agility and allowing you to do more with fewer resources.
With rapid access to new combinations of services and leading-edge
technologies supported by more efficient decision making and a highly
optimized, end-to-end process, a cloud-based approach enables your IT
team to shift its focus to innovation while creating significant economies of
scale—all to provide differentiating value propositions for your enterprise
at lower costs and in a shorter timeframe. If properly used within an overall
IT strategy, cloud computing can help improve business performance and
control the costs of delivering IT resources to your organization.
Cloud computing: defined and demystified
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Benefits include:

• A dynamic infrastructure that can help improve service, reduce cost and
manage risk
• Simplified delivery of services, resulting in significantly less IT
maintenance and development costs
• Greater scalability and flexible, adaptable, extendable systems
• A cost-efficient, pay-as-you-grow model
• More rapid recovery and restore capabilities (including e-mail and data
on laptops and desktops), for improved business resiliency
• The ability to reach and drive user communities and consumers of new
cloud services (such as social networking)
• Accelerate innovative projects that can lead to new revenue by bringing
cloud services for access by users on a global scale, increasing your
competitive advantage
• Enhanced governance capabilities and improved risk and compliance
• Flexible data and process location options
• Greater cost transparency transparency, visibility and control
• Increased return on investment of existing assets, freeing capital to
deploy strategically
• Allow IT to deliver more standardized applications and
outsource commodities
• Acquire and release computing services while making the technology
virtually invisible to the user
• Enforce the integrated visibility, control and automation across the cloud
services lifecycle
• Ease user adoption and empowerment through self-service provisioning
• Provide a simple, effective and creative service delivery model
• Deliver services in a less costly and higher-quality business model, while
providing service access ubiquity
• Utilize an acquisition and delivery model of IT services, within an overall
IT strategy, to improve business performance and control the costs of
delivering IT resources to the organization
Cloud computing: defined and demystified
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To sum it up, you can lower both your capital and operating
expenses with less IT purchases, expenditures, staff, and
through optimization, which occurs from physical consolidation,
application infrastructure virtualization, system virtualization
and better IT management.

Types of clouds

Current cloud computing models are available in three main

implementation options: private, public and hybrid. To be technically
precise, the services reside within the cloud but, like the Internet and
an intranet, the cloud can be private or public to the enterprise or a mix
of both. This section explains the difference between each, their potential
benefits and drawbacks, as well as the technical and business objectives
that align with each model.

Flexible delivery models

Public Private
• Service provider owned and • Privately owned and
managed managed
• Access by subscription • Access limited to client
Cloud services
• Delivers select set of and its partner network
standardized business process, • Drives efficiency,
application and infrastructure Cloud computing standardization and best
services on a flexible, price per- model practices while retaining
use basis greater customization and
control
Hybrid
• Access to client, partner
network and third-party
Offers standardization, capital resources Offers customization, efficiency,
preservation, flexibility and availability, resiliency, security
time to deploy and privacy

Organization Culture Governance

Figure 2. Cloud computing delivery models: public, private and hybrid

Cloud computing: defined and demystified
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Public clouds
Highlights

Public (or external) clouds deliver a select set of dynamically provisioned,

A cloud computing environment standardized business process, application and infrastructure services
that is open for use to the general and resources using Internet-based technologies on a flexible, variable
public, including individuals, payment and self-service basis. Typically owned and managed by an
corporations or other types offsite, third-party provider, the billing is provided on a fine-grain utility
of organizations computing basis and accessed by subscription. Examples of public
clouds are Google Apps, iPhone apps and Amazon’s Elastic Compute
Cloud (EC2). (IBM is collaborating with Amazon to enable software
developers to quickly build preproduction applications based on IBM
software within the Amazon EC2 environment.) As enterprises and service
providers become more experienced with the cloud architecture model
and gain confidence in the security and access-control technologies
that are available, it is expected that many service providers will deploy
externally facing cloud services.

Advantages: Public clouds often cost less than private clouds to initially set
up, and move IT spending from a capital-expense-based to an operating-
expense-based model. They can offer the fastest route to adopting cloud
technology, since services can immediately be accessed, often through
the use of a credit card. The shared resource pool for public clouds is often
larger than that of private clouds, which makes the resources more elastic.

Disadvantages: Public clouds may be vulnerable to security threats

and their services can be less flexible and robust than a private cloud.
Availability and service levels can also vary widely with public cloud
providers. Public clouds are often fairly fixed and controlled environments,
offering a set of services that may or may not meet sophisticated enterprise
requirements. Legal ownership of data and privacy information is often not
well documented.

Works best if you need:

• Fast access to standardized cloud services
• No capital outlay to provide new services
• Experimenting with cloud computing
• Limited commitment to a service provider
Cloud computing: defined and demystified
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Private clouds
Highlights

Private (or internal) clouds provide security-rich on demand access to

A cloud computing environment business process, application and infrastructure services and resources,
maintained on your own and is managed within the organization. Private clouds can be delivered
IT infrastructure using a private through a data center or an intranet, with access limited to your users and
network or hosted by a service partner networks. A layer of new technologies will typically be added—
provider virtualization management, cloud infrastructure, self-service portals,
chargeback systems, and more—to existing data center systems
and processes.

Advantages: Private clouds have many of the benefits of traditional data

centers and public clouds, including access to a large resource pool
that offers new choices for running workloads internally or externally or
in dynamic combination. These types of clouds are often not burdened
by public network bandwidth and availability issues or potential security
exposures that can be associated with public clouds. Private clouds allow
the provider and user greater control and customization, security and
resilience while driving efficiency, standardization and best practices in
development and deployment processes. They are readily auditable and
can provide a more secure environment with high availability. In addition,
private clouds provide a potentially smoother migration path from a
traditional IT infrastructure models to a cloud-based one with more control
and security. Many companies are experimenting with a private cloud,
with the goal of migrating various workloads to a private or hybrid
cloud environment.

Disadvantages: Private clouds can be more costly at the outset than

public clouds, but are still more cost-efficient and flexible than traditional
IT delivery environments.

Works best if you need:

• An intranet-like implementation for employees, customers,
partners, suppliers
• Customization and flexibility
• Auditing and compliance
Cloud computing: defined and demystified
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• Security and privacy

Highlights • Data protection
• Service delivery within a virtual private network (VPN)
• Availability and service levels
• Control over the environment

Private clouds can be implemented as an:

• On-site, managed cloud
• Off-site, hosted cloud – dedicated resources
A cloud computing model that
combines public and private Hybrid clouds
models, with your enterprise
owning parts of the cloud and Part public cloud service and part internal private cloud, a hybrid cloud
sharing other parts, in a highly model can be set up in several ways; for example, using an outside
controlled way provider’s hardware (such as cloud appliances) onsite that is designed to
provide cloud-based services. The hybrid is ideal for a private cloud user
that has demand peaks that require resource elasticity, but the cost of
permanently acquiring that asset far outweighs on demand access costs,
even at a premium price. IBM demonstrated a hybrid type approach earlier
in 2009 that enables companies to move application processing from
an internal cloud to a public cloud facility, while keeping all data stored
within the private cloud. This type of hybrid cloud approach may work well
for companies that cannot otherwise use a public cloud for security or
regulatory reasons.

Advantages: Hybrid clouds provide the scaling advantages of an on

demand, externally provisioned cloud while also increasing security,
privacy and auditability. An enterprise can decide which services are
offered through public or private clouds and at what service levels,
selecting the most optimal delivery methods at a flexible cost structure.
Flexible use of hybrid clouds can offer enterprise cost-effective IT service
delivery options to meet dynamic business requirements and at the
same time, still meet strict security and service level agreements for
critical services.

Disadvantages: Added complexity of distributed applications across

different environments that can increase management and monitoring
requirements within the environment.
Cloud computing: defined and demystified
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Works best if you need:

Highlights
• Support for simple stateless applications that don’t require
complex databases
To address specific challenges, • Optimal flexibility, scalability and service levels combined with the
such as return on investment, need for highly innovative environments that require rapid availability
capacity and availability issues, of new services
many organizations are adopting • Advantages of both types of cloud implementations for an optimal price
cloud computing models for their compared against your need for flexibility, security and ability to meet
testing environments. service level agreements

Workload considerations for cloud implementation options

With so much information and chatter surrounding cloud-based solutions,

determining the right approach for your enterprise can be challenging.
As cloud computing evolves, so does its capabilities, which means not
all your workloads are currently appropriate for a cloud-based model.
By providing examples of workloads that are both appropriate and not
appropriate for cloud migration, the following sections can help you get
started in determining the best approach for your enterprise.

Workloads that can take advantage of public clouds

• Test systems and environments

• Single virtual appliance workloads
• Preproduction systems and environments
• Mature packaged offerings, like e-mail and collaboration
• Software development environments
• Batch processing jobs with limited security requirements
• Isolated workloads where latency between components is not an issue
• Storage solutions (including storage as a service)
• Backup solutions (including backup and restore as a service)
• Data-intensive workloads if the provider has a cloud storage offering
linked to the cloud compute offering
Cloud computing: defined and demystified
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Workloads more appropriate for private clouds

• Employee information or other sensitive data typically restricted

to the enterprise
• Workloads composed of multiple, co-dependent services
• High throughput online transaction processing
• Workloads based on third-party software that does not have a
virtualization or cloud-aware licensing strategy
• Workloads requiring customization

Forecast: The future of cloud computing

In the early days of the Internet, many people were skeptical about its
future. No one doubted that it facilitated better communication and the
sharing of information, but few people possessed the vision to foresee that
the Internet, and intranets, could—and would—so dramatically transform
the way we interact, learn, connect and do business. IBM anticipates that
like the Internet, cloud computing technology will go through a similar
evolution that, over time, will allow access to many more transformational
tools and capabilities.

Many industry analysts foresee cloud computing as an approach that

will transform businesses as it matures. The Economist recently reported
that “Clouds will transform the information technology (IT) industry… and
profoundly change the way people work and companies operate.” 1
A senior analyst at Forrester predicts that, “Clouds are going to become
less of a work in progress…and become more of a mature reality, in terms
of how enterprises acquire functionality, how they acquire applications
and platforms.” 2

The following IDC survey3 shows that usage level of IT cloud services are
predicted to rise over the next three years. “The survey results suggest
we’re entering a period of accelerating IT cloud services adoption, with the
portion of organizations exhibiting significant adoption moving from 15 to
25 percent today to 25 to 45 percent in three years.” 3
Cloud computing: defined and demystified
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Implementing a cloud computing solution

Now that you’ve explored the ways that various types of cloud
implementations can potentially benefit your organization, your next step
should be to evaluate how you might be able to transition from a traditional
onsite client-server and data center model to an IT infrastructure where
applications, compute, storage and business processes are all delivered
as cloud-based services.

You will need a trusted partner to help you decide how and where to start
in making that transition. IBM is an industry leader in contributing to and
establishing cloud reference architectures while developing and delivering
cloud-enabling technologies and products to companies around the
world. Our deep data center expertise is based on vast experience in
managing multiple, global next-generation cloud computing centers and
refined through thousands successful implementations and projects.
Backed by this expertise, IBM is able to create and deliver cost-effective
and energy-efficient IT resources for your business. Equipped with deep
industry expertise, IBM can help you develop cloud solutions tailored to
your specific business needs.

Using a vendor-neutral, comprehensive open standards approach, IBM © Copyright IBM Corporation 2009

works with you to assess your needs and then design, implement and IBM Global Services
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deploy a cloud computing solution tailored to meet your unique business Somers, NY 10589
requirements. If you want to start small with a private test cloud, a typical U.S.A.

on-ramp to cloud adoption, IBM Implementation Services for cloud Produced in the United States of America.
April 2009
computing – design and implementation for test environments provides All Rights Reserved.
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management of IBM WebSphere® Application Server virtual images with trademarks or registered trademarks of International
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For more information legal/copytrade.shtml

References in this publication to IBM products or

For more information about cloud computing, please contact an IBM services do not imply that IBM intends to make them
available in all countries in which IBM operates.
representative or visit: www.ibm.com/cloud

1
The Economist (print edition) special report, interview
Additionally, IBM Global Financing can tailor financing solutions to a with Ludwig Siegele, October 23, 2008 http://www.
customer’s specific IT needs. For more information on rates, flexible economist.com/specialreports/displaystory.cfm?story_
id=12411882
payment plans and loans, and asset buyback and disposal, visit:
2
“2009 predictions for IT, SOA, cloud and BI,” podcast,
citing Jim Kobielus, senior analyst, Forrester Research
ibm.com/financing 3
IDC eXchange, IT Cloud Services User Survey, pt 1:
Crossing the Chasm, http://blogs.idc.com/ie/?p=205
September 29, 2008

www.economist.com/specialreports/displaystory.
cfm?story_id=12411882

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