Int. J. Business Information Systems, Vol. 22, No.

2, 2016 123

Evolution and present status of cloud computing:

a comprehensive analysis

Viney Sharma* and

Gur Mauj Saran Srivastava
Department of Physics and Computer Science,
Dayalbagh Educational Institute,
Dayalbagh, Agra-282005, India
Email: [email protected]
Email: [email protected]
*Corresponding author

Abstract: Since the inception of cloud computing, people are in a dilemma

about its novelty, model, adoption challenges, cost etc. They have a wide range
of opinion from merely business hype to revolutionary boon for ICT industries.
Our objective through this paper is to present a less cloudy picture of cloud
computing and answer some questions: “how this concept came into
existence?”, “how did it evolve from an earlier ‘calculating machine’ to
‘present cloud’?”, “how it is different from existing computing models?”, “who
would benefit from clouds?”, “is it for all?”, “the adoption challenges
especially security” and “how much clouds have progressed in the last year in
the business domain?”. Our study reveals that clouds have made unprecedented
growth in the last year. Its adoption rate, popularity, benefits and domain, have
expanded sharply, while challenges and reluctance towards it have shown
decline. Our idea is to present maximum information under one roof.

Keywords: cloud computing; cloud survey; cloud challenges; cloud status;

cloud evolution; cloud analysis; clouds in business.

Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Sharma, V. and

Srivastava, G.M.S. (2016) ‘Evolution and present status of cloud computing: a
comprehensive analysis’, Int. J. Business Information Systems, Vol. 22, No. 2,
pp.123–142.

Biographical notes: Viney Sharma is a Research Scholar in the Department of

Physics and Computer Science, Dayalbagh Educational Institute, Agra, India.
He is pursuing his PhD in Virtualisation in Cloud Computing Environment.
He has 12 years of teaching experience. His research interests include cloud
computing, computer networks and operating systems.

Gur Mauj Saran Srivastava is an Associate Professor in the Department of

Physics and Computer Science, Dayalbagh Educational Institute, Agra, India.
He has more than 20 years of teaching experience. His research interests
include cloud computing, database systems and data mining.

Copyright © 2016 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.

124 V. Sharma and G.M.S. Srivastava

1 Introduction

Cloud computing is a revolution that will define IT in the second decade of the
21st century. Some authors use the term cloud computing to refer to a new paradigm of
computing while some authors speak of a new technology that offers IT resources and
services over the internet. It is seen as the commercial realisation of distributed
processing, parallel processing and grid computing in supercomputing mode based upon
network. Cloud computing is the evolution and jump of the concepts of virtualisation,
utility computing, infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS),
software-as-a-service (SaaS). Broadly speaking ‘cloud computing’ refers to the delivery
and usage patterns of IT infrastructure, and obtaining the necessary resources (hardware,
platform, software) by the on-demanding way through the network. Here the word
‘cloud’ refers to the ‘network’ through which resources are provided. Resources in
‘cloud’ from the users’ position appears to be infinitely extensible and obtained at any
time, used on-demand, extended at any time, pay per use. Generalised cloud computing
refers to the delivery and usage patterns of service, and obtaining the necessary services
by the on-demanding and scalable way through the network. This new computing model
is attractive for small and medium companies which cannot afford cost intensive
computational power, fail proof large storage. Zheng et al. (2011) suggest that “at the
present stage it may not be suitable for real time applications. This service can be related
with IT, software, internet and can also be any other service”. The experts at Gartner see
cloud computing as an ‘emerging technology’ on its way to the hype (Jackie et al., 2008).
Gartner Research expects cloud computing to be a $150 billion business by end of 2014,
and according to AMI partners, small and medium businesses are expected to spend over
$100 billion on cloud computing by end of 2014 (Marston et al., 2011). Grilo and
Jardim-Goncalves (2012) visualise that “cloud computing is heading towards
architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) sector also”. Google search for cloud
computing shows the high interest on the topic. A key factor here is that organisations
will have to lift ICT from the level of an infrastructure issue to that of a business
opportunity. Cloud computing will need to be seen as a valuable business tool – one
that will differentiate the company from others (Budde, 2013). Mainly among
small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs), there are a lot of companies that focus on the
development of product software. The change from custom software to product software
requires significant adaptations in the management of business processes (Vlaanderen
et al., 2013). Although, nearly everybody in the IT sector talks of cloud computing, the
concept remains cloudy to many. Geoffrey and Worthen (2009) write that: “according to
Oracle’s Larry Ellison, cloud computing has been defined to include everything that we
already do. It can be hardly think of anything that is not cloud computing. The computer
industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women’s fashion”. Cloud
computing is expected to become catalyst for the long envisioned notion of ‘ubiquitous
computing’ enabling this revolution through a number of means:
• the ability to increase computing and efficiency through virtualisation
• bringing enterprise scale infrastructure to small and medium businesses through
democratisation of computing
 Evolution and present status of cloud computing 125

• bringing web scale IT at a rapid pace through scalability and fast provisioning
• enabling IT to focus on the strategic aspects of its role through commoditisation of
infrastructure.
Petrescu (2012) puts that “the overall benefits of cloud computing, including low cost and
low investment, real-time accessibility, standardization and flexibility lead to lower
transaction costs, asset specificity and opportunism”.

2 Literature review

Authors have their own perception about cloud computing; what is included in clouds,
how it is different from previously emerged concepts. Cloud model is still in the infancy
stage due to shared security concern and immature last mile connectivity. Administrators
are still unsure how to determine the measurable organisational value when investing in
IaaS (Soon et al., 2014). In cloud computing, clients comply a policy of pay-as-you go,
i.e., they only pay for the resources they use. So, the processing power of the clouds has
to be optimised to reduce the cost at client’s side. Using the resources optimally ensures
enterprise sustainability of cloud service providers (Dhinesh Babu et al., 2014). NIST has
defined cloud computing as a model for enabling 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 provisioned and released with minimal
management effort or service provider interaction (NIST, 2012). Marks (2012)
commented: “the term cloud computing comes from the early days in the internet where
we drew the network as a cloud. We didn’t care where the message went. The cloud
hid it from us”. Youseff et al. (2008) were among the first who tried to provide a
comprehensive understanding of cloud computing and all its relevant components.
According to them, cloud computing is a new paradigm that has many old and few new
concepts in several research fields like service-oriented architectures, distributed and grid
computing as well as virtualisation. It allows users to temporary utilise computing
infrastructure over the network, supplied as a service by the cloud provider. Armbrust
et al. (2009) advocate for its “feeling of immense computing power available on demand,
less up-front commitment to resources for cloud user, pay-as-you-use flavour”. Buyya
et al. (2008) regard cloud computing as a “kind of parallel and distributed system,
consisting of a collection of virtualized computers. This system provides resources
dynamically; whereas service level agreements (SLA) is negotiated between the service
provider and the customer”. Vaquero et al. (2009) have derived similarities, based on
Geelan’s collection of expert opinions (Geelan, 2009). They say: “clouds are a large pool
of easily usable and accessible virtualized resources such as hardware, development
platforms and/or services. These resources can be dynamically reconfigured to adjust to a
variable scale, allowing also for optimum resource utilization. This pool of resources is
typically exploited by a pay-per-use model in which guarantees are offered by the
infrastructure provider by means of customized SLAs”. Babcock (2010) said: “at one
time corporations built out high-performance proprietary networks to link different
locations. As the internet became the default connection between universities,
government agencies and some companies, the cost of not having a network internally
went up and up”. Charles Babcock is pointing towards this new paradigm i.e. cloud
126 V. Sharma and G.M.S. Srivastava

computing for reducing cost (Kepes, 2009). The market research company IDC takes
cloud computing as: “an emerging IT development, deployment and delivery model,
enabling real-time delivery of products, services and solutions over the internet”. In that
sense, cloud computing is the technical basis for cloud services, offering consumer and
business solutions that are consumed in real-time over the internet. The technological
foundation of cloud computing includes infrastructure, system software, application
development and deployment software, system and application management software as
well as IP-based network services. IDC also mentions usage-bound pricing as a core
characteristic (Gens, 2008). Another market research company Gartner has its own view
of cloud computing: a style of computing where massively scalable IT-enabled
capabilities are delivered ‘as a service’ to external customers using internet technologies
(Jackie, 2008). Technology challenges facing global business systems are framed in
volume (scale), real-time distribution and real-time universal access to the visual state of
the global business process and its associated physical and financial workflow (Maad and
Coghlan, 2010). Smith (2011) commented: “cloud computing trend should generate
vastly different sources of competitive advantage like networking economies of scale,
new opportunities for the purely physical business to a more green-based IT to eliminate
distribution channels that only provide information, changes in brand identity, and
reduced operating cost”. As Table 1 shows, IaaS and scalability are features included in
almost all definitions.
Table 1 A comparison of tycoons’ view about cloud computing Guaranteed performance
Off-house-deployment
Pay-as-per-utilisation

Pre-agreement upon
quality of service

Virtualisation
Automation

Scalability

Internet
Author

DaaS
PaaS

SaaS
IaaS

NIST (2012) definition √ √ √ √ √ √ √ √ √

Wang et al. (2008) √ √ √
Nurmi et al. (2008) √ √ √ √
Armbrust et al. (2009) √ √ √ √ √ √
Kim (2009) √ √ √ √ √ √
Grossman and Yunhong (2009) √ √ √ √
Breiter and Behrendt (2008) √ √ √ √ √
Jackie et al. (2008) √ √ √ √
Foster et al. (2008) √ √ √ √ √ √
Gens (2008) √ √ √ √
McFredries (2008) √ √ √ √
Gruman and Knorr (2008) √ √ √ √
 Evolution and present status of cloud computing 127

Table 1 A comparison of tycoons’ view about cloud computing (continued)

Guaranteed performance
Off-house-deployment
Pay-as-per-utilisation

Pre-agreement upon
quality of service

Virtualisation
Automation

Scalability

Internet
Author

DaaS
PaaS

SaaS
IaaS
Vykoukal et al. (2009) √ √ √ √
Weiss (2007) √ √ √
Youseff et al. (2008) √ √ √ √ √ √
Vaquero et al. (2009) √ √ √ √ √ √
Buyya et al. (2008) √ √ √ √
Briscoe and Marinos (2009) √ √ √ √ √
Yes 18 6 10 5 8 2 2 1 15 3 9 7

Kepes (2010) quotes Oracle’s Larry Ellison view about cloud computing: “cloud
computing is just new name for what has gone before. All the cloud is, computers in a
network. Our industry is so bizarre. They just change a term and they think
they’ve invented technology”. Many of cloud computing’s features – virtualisation,
pay-as-you-go, outsourcing have been around much longer. Yet there are those who
argue that despite the similarities to what has come before, the cloud is fundamentally
different. Salesforce.com’s Marc Benioff, himself a former Oracle executive has his own
definition of cloud computing: cloud “computing is multi-tenant, it’s faster, half the cost,
pay as you go, and it grows as you grow or shrinks as you shrink. It is extremely
efficient. We’re not going to show you computers taller than you. We’re not going to
show you a cloud in a box because clouds don’t come in a box. They never have. That’s
the whole idea”. Actually ‘computers taller than you’ refers to Oracle’s Exalogic elastic
cloud, an impressive mix of hardware and software designed to power web-scale
enterprise applications. According to him, cloud computing is not about individual
businesses buying bigger and better hardware, what Oracle calls a ‘cloud in a box’. The
cloud is about businesses giving up the cost and burden of managing and maintaining
hardware all together. Werner Vogels of Amazon Web Services (AWS), said in favour of
Benioff, “if you have to buy more hardware just to get started it is not a cloud” (Kepes,
2010). In a previous article appeared in the Spring 2005 issue of the MIT Sloan
Management Review, Carr wrote that: “as a business resource, IT today looks a lot like
electric power did at the start of the last century, when it was routinely produced by
individual businesses rather than utility providers, executives are routinely sidetracked
from their real business by the need to keep their company’s private IT infrastructure
running smoothly”. Noting the similarities between computing and a technology that
most would agree is best handled by specialists rather than individual firms, Carr then
moves onto a discussion about the consequences of self provisioning infrastructure and
the resulting overcapacity that often accompanies it: “when overcapacity is combined
with redundant functionality, the conditions are ripe for a shift to centralized supply. Yet
companies continue to invest large sums in maintaining and even expanding their private,
128 V. Sharma and G.M.S. Srivastava

subscale data centers. Why? For the same reason that manufacturers continued to install
private electric generators during the early decades of the 20th century: because of the
lack of a viable, large-scale utility model. But such a model is now emerging...” The
model that Carr says in emerging is cloud computing. Cloud computing provides specific
economics that are beneficial under many situations – specially anytime demand is
erratic, the organisation is in a state of change or when pressure comes to bear to move
from capital expenditure to operational expenditure (Kepes, 2010).

3 Salient features

3.1 Virtualisation
High end servers having enormous computing power remain underutilised as single
application may not need its full computing resources. Virtualisation, which is backbone
of cloud computing, was developed to exploit the large computational power of servers
among multiple virtual machines. Virtualisation has emerged as vital part of cloud
computing environment because of its capability to multiplex many virtual machines on
the same physical machines, and at the same time provide isolated environment to each
virtual machines. The software used to demultiplex the physical machine among many
virtual machines is known as virtual machine monitor/hypervisor. Recently emerged
cloud computing paradigm leverages virtualisation and provides on-demand resource
provisioning over the internet on a pay-as-you go basis (Vecchiola et al., 2012). This
facilitates enterprises to reduce the expenditure on maintenance of their own computing
environment and outsource the computational needs to the cloud. This division of a single
physical server into multiple ‘virtual’ servers containing multiple sets of segregated data
is the backbone of cloud computing as it allows for far greater flexibility and resource
utilisation. Virtualisation not only brings efficiency gains in terms of processing power
but also saves electric power, space and cooling since the number of physical machines
running is greatly reduced. To illustrate this point, studies (Nucleus Research, 2010) have
found that cloud applications consume 90% less energy than on-premise resources.
Therefore, virtualisation forms the basis of cloud computing, as it provides the capability
of pooling computing resources from clusters of servers and dynamically provisioning of
virtual resources to applications on-demand. While convenient, the use of virtual
machines gives rise to further challenges such as the intelligent allocation of physical
resources for managing competing resource demands of the users (Sakr et al., 2011).

3.2 Democratisation of computing

Cloud computing is extending a vibrant shift in terms of business development. Earlier,
to start a business, an organisation had to invest a significant capital into hardware,
software and its maintenance. Few years back; high end servers, huge capacity RAM,
infinite capacity storage devices were accessible to large universities, research institutes
and government agencies only. Common man could hardly experience these. Cloud
computing paradigm has revolutionise the way computing power is made available. It is
now almost effortless for an entrepreneur to set themselves up with some infrastructure
and applications upon which to run their business. A recent study by Github (2010)
indicates that less than 25% of start-ups are self hosting their web infrastructure. This
 Evolution and present status of cloud computing 129

democratisation is analogous to the breakthrough in cell phone communication. Now

even a common man is accessible to fast machines, latest software, enormous storage at a
very reasonable price which was not possible before (Kepes, 2010).

3.3 Scalability and fast provisioning

Organisations with unpredictable load (which is common these days), experience one of
two situations:
1 an over provision of servers resulting in unused resources for significant time thus
creating higher cost per application
2 an under provision of servers that creates significant impacts in service level
agreement.
Organisations cannot afford any of these situations as these lead to high operational cost
which leads to costlier services thus reducing efficacy of this new paradigm. Information
and communication technology (ICT) industry is experiencing high levels of volatility in
their computing needs. Cloud computing enables organisations to maintain infrastructure
at required levels at all times, and as such it enables cost savings to be gained by virtue of
the fact that, despite the per unit price from a utility service provider potentially being
higher than an owned resource, aggregate cost can be reduced by paying only for what is
required when it is required. Having the ability to scale is beneficial, but not when it
comes at the cost of significant administration and management. Luckily, cloud
computing also commoditises infrastructure which frees up IT departments to focus on
their key strategic objectives.

3.4 Commoditisation of infrastructure

ICT is under pressure to produce greater outputs, with less capital expenditure. Cloud
gave the solution. Cloud computing offers the ability for ICT organisations to apply
resources as, and where, they are needed. Relieving from this overhead by moving to the
cloud free up ICT resources for adding business value rather than simply maintaining the
status quo. Now they need not to worry about upgrading hardware, hardware and
software compatibility problems, software licenses etc. Kepes (2010) point out that: “now
organisation personnel need to move from being primarily technologist with a little of
business knowledge to being truly balanced professionals who can equally mix technical
ability with an understanding of the business traits. The very fact that they are able to
abstract responsibility for what are essentially commodity services to a third party drives
significantly more value to the organization than any mere financial benefit through cost
reductions that cloud computing can bring”.

4 From calculating machine to clouds

Cloud computing concepts have their roots in 1957 when IBM introduced the 704 as
the first mass produced mainframe computer with floating-point arithmetic and IBM
System/360 in 1964.
130 V. Sharma and G.M.S. Srivastava

4.1 From calculating machine to mainframe

‘Computing’ started its journey in 1623 with the invention of first calculating machine by
Wilhelm Schickard, which worked according to the principle of Napier’s bones, a sort of
Abacus. Another milestone in computing history was achieved by Charles Babbage for
his Analytical Engine in 1837, a mechanical calculating machine for general purpose
tasks. Other milestones were Allan Marquand’s draft of an electrical logic machine in
1885 and Herman Hollerith’s development of a tabulating machine in 1890. The
electrical logic machine was first realised in 1936 by Benjamin Burack. However, the
actual history of the modern computer began with Konrad Zuse’s construction of the Z3,
the first functioning digital computer in 1941. It was based on the binary digit system,
programmable, and Turing capable (Rojas, 1997). In 1945, John Mauchley and J. Presper
Eckert built ENIAC, an Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, which was
considered the first fully electronic tube computer (Bohm et al., 2012). The ENIAC was
as well programmable and Turing capable, but was based on the decimal system.
Invention of the transistor in 1947 was a boon for the computer industries. Cloud
computing concepts have their roots in 1957 when IBM introduced the 704 as the first
mass produced mainframe computer with floating-point arithmetic and IBM System/360
in 1964. Large-scale mainframes serviced the needs of universities and organisations.
The mainframes were installed in big rooms called server rooms. One room could
accommodate single mainframe. Due to heavy cost, installation and maintenance
expenditures, multiple users shared expensive hardware through dumb terminals called
stations in time sharing fashion. When looking back at the operating models of the
‘60s and ‘70s, one realises that with Cloud computing, an old trend is coming back:
centralised, shared computing resources. The so called time-sharing concept, where idle
CPU slots were dynamically distributed to several users, can be traced back to
John McCarthy in 1957 (Bohm et al., 2012). In the early days of data processing,
computers as well as their operations were expensive. Therefore the operators were
looking for ways to utilise them in the best way possible. Thus, companies with large
mainframe computers offered their computing resources to external users. This
eventually led to the foundation of independent service providers which specialised on
the deployment of computing resources. Companies that offered time-sharing-systems
were for example General Electric’s Information Service Company (GEISCO), IBM’s
subsidiary The Service Bureau Corporation or Tymshare Inc. Users of these time-sharing
services could access the mainframe computer through dial-up connections, using
terminals that were simple input/output devices. The mainframe computers typically
provided a complete working environment, including different software packages,
programming environments, file storage and printing services. Pricing models were
commonly based on a fixed rental fee for the terminal and variable costs for connection
time, consumed CPU time and storage usage (Greaves, 2008). Though one can think of
timesharing systems when talking of cloud computing but this new paradigm is much
more to that. By enabling shared mainframe access, an organisation would get a better
return on its investment in this sophisticated piece of technology. Further developments
and the miniaturisation of the mainframe computers eventually led to independent
machines, so called minicomputers such as DEC’s PDP-8 in 1964 or Xerox’s Alto in
1974 (Freiberger and Swaine, 2008).
 Evolution and present status of cloud computing 131

4.2 From mainframe to personal computers

Personal computer (PC) came in to existence in the 1970s, with the construction of the
first microprocessor 4004 in 1969 and the later 8008 in 1971 by Intel. In 1970s, IBM
released an operating system called virtual machine (VM) that allowed administrators on
their System/370 mainframe systems to have multiple virtual systems, or VMs on a single
physical node. The VM operating system took the 1950s shared access of a mainframe to
the next level by allowing multiple distinct compute environments to live in the same
physical environment. Although much more sophisticated than 1970s, most of the basic
functions of any virtualisation software available now a days can be traced back to this
early VM OS. Every VM could run custom operating systems or guest operating systems
that had their own memory, CPU, and hard drives along with CD-ROMs, keyboards and
networking (all virtual). Virtualisation became a technology driver, and it became a huge
catalyst for some of the biggest evolutions in ICT. MITS in 1975 developed the Altair
8800 as construction set, which was one of the first home computers, which for Microsoft
has developed a BASIC Interpreter. More and more home computers followed, such as
by Apple, Atari, Commodore and others. As late as 1981 IBM entered this market
segment and coined the name PC. Microsoft has developed the operating system for the
IBM-PC, which soon became the standard platform, with which many PC manufacturers
were compatible with (Freiberger and Swaine, 2008). Since then the development and
penetration of PC’s into human life gained pace, even faster processors were introduced,
graphical user interfaces were established, human-computer interaction became graceful
and the continuing miniaturisation eventually led to the development of laptops and
mobile devices.

4.3 From personal computers to internet

Another important milestone was the development of the internet. Internet took the world
in its stride. Internet has its roots in a research project at the Advanced Research Projects
Agency (ARPA). A communication system, which would stay available if one of its
nodes would be broken, was developed in 1969, on behalf of the US Ministry of Defense.
Eventually, the ARPAnet was developed out of this project. In 1981 around
200 institutions were connected to this network. This network of networks was soon
called internet. While at the beginning it was primarily used for military and scientific
purposes, its opening and commercialisation began in 1988 with services like mail, telnet
and usenet. However, the internet achieved its real breakthrough with Tim Berners-Lee’s
invention of the WWW in 1989. Tim Berners-Lee conceptualised an information
management system for the European organisation for nuclear research (CERN), which
was based on hypertext, a network structure, where knowledge entities are referenced
through logical references, so called hyperlinks. Traditional hyper textual structures are
for example content tables or cross references. The modern hypertext concept can be
traced back to Vannevar Bush (1945). With the increasing diffusion of the web browser
Mosaic, the WWW eventually gained great popularity (Freiberger and Swaine, 2008). In
the 1990s, telecommunications companies took this revolution to new heights. As the
users started growing, instead of developing more physical infrastructure, they enhanced
their services from dedicated point-to-point data connection to virtual private network
connections with the same service quality as their dedicated services at a reduced cost.
This change allowed the telecommunication companies to shift traffic as necessary to
132 V. Sharma and G.M.S. Srivastava

allow for better network balance and more control over bandwidth usage. Meanwhile,
virtualisation for PC-based systems started in earnest, and as the internet became more
accessible, the next logical step was to take virtualisation online (Steddum, 2013). As the
internet as well as online applications grew, the demand of costly computing resources
became volatile according to workload. The solution adopted was ‘virtualisation’. Servers
were virtualised into shared hosting environments, virtual private servers, and virtual
dedicated servers using the same types of functionality provided by the VM OS in the
1950s. This kind of environment saved on infrastructure costs and minimised the amount
of actual hardware organisations needed to achieve desired performance. Further
increasing bandwidths and technologies like Java made it possible to develop more and
more elaborate, interactive websites. Due to this development, we can today find many
multimedia websites, online shops and numerous applications that are deployed in the
internet. Some examples are route planners, communication platforms, social networks
and even whole office applications like word processors or spread sheet applications.
This deployment concept, usually referred to SaaS gained popularity around the year
2000 (Finch, 2006). Similar deployment concepts were developed for the deployment of
hardware resources, especially computing power and storage. Primarily in academia,
concept of grid computing got established at the beginning of the 1990s (Foster and
Kesselman, 2003).

4.4 Computing paradox

As the costs of server hardware started coming down as we entered in 21st century, more
users were able to purchase their own dedicated servers. This led to a ‘computing
paradox’. One question arises in every mind, when electronic components are becoming
more and more powerful and cost-effective, then why to take hardware on rent. The
answer is, though computers are becoming more and more powerful and cost-effective, at
the same time computing is becoming more and more expensive. Computing is becoming
more and more persistent within the organisation and the management of large databases,
information systems, distributed databases and other software now, was not a matter of
cup of tea. With the penetration of IT in everyone’s life, growth of internet and excessive
offering of online services by most organisations, with the advent of memory eating
applications, large numbers of servers were required and consequently large expenditure
was required. With this increased complexity, computing has become more expensive
than ever before to an organisation. Here cloud computing took shape. By installing and
configuring a piece of software called a hypervisor across multiple physical nodes, a
system would present all of the environment’s resources as though those resources were
in a single physical node. To help visualise that environment, technologists used terms
like ‘utility computing’ and ‘cloud computing’. In these cloud computing environments,
it became easy to add resources to the ‘cloud’: Just add another server to the rack and
configure it to become part of the bigger system.

4.5 From internet to cloud computing

By the year 2005 most of the businesses whether they were IT organisations or others,
were using computer hardware, software, storage devices, cooling equipments. Their
operational cost was exceeding their capital cost and resources were not used throughout
the day. Moreover electricity budgets were crossing their boundaries. At the same time IT
 Evolution and present status of cloud computing 133

giants such as Amazon and Google were confronting with a similar situation as it has
been in the 1960s and 1970s. They as well strived to utilise their immense resources in a
better way. Approaches, such as virtualisation became efficient means to grant third party
users to dynamically access their infrastructure and harness computing power and storage
capacities. Then cloud computing concepts were shaped into practice in 2007, typically
refereeing to a joint hardware and software deployment concept. First research initiatives
were started by Google and IBM, in cooperation with six American universities (Lohr,
2009). Big organisations, who were having huge infrastructures, high end servers,
enormous storage, high speed networks, started offering IaaS, PaaS, SaaS in the form of
utilities. Now organisations, whose nature of job was not computing, started taking
option of outsourcing their computational needs to cloud providers. In this way cloud
computing started its real journey. As technologies and hypervisors got better at reliably
sharing and delivering resources, many enterprising companies decided to start carving
up the bigger environment to make the cloud’s benefits to users who do not happen to
have an abundance of physical servers available to create their own cloud computing
infrastructure. Those users could order cloud computing instances by ordering the
resources they need from the larger pool of available cloud resources, and because the
servers are already online, the process of ‘powering up’ a new instance or server is almost
instantaneous.

5 Comparing grids and clouds side by side

At first glance, if we look at the computing history and prediction of John McCarthey in
1961 that “computation may some-day be organised as a public utility”, we get feeling
that cloud computing is no entirely new idea (Foster et al., 2008). It has been around us in
the form of utility computing or grid computing. But if we analyse deliberately, we
deduce that clouds and grids have lot of common features but with different taste. Grid
computing can be seen as cloud computing’s sister computing model. These can be
compared on grounds of business model, architecture, resource management, application
model and security model. Let us analyse both at different platforms.

5.1 Business model

In a cloud-based business model, a customer will pay the provider on a consumption
basis, very much like the utility companies charge for basic utilities such as electricity,
gas, water and the model relies on economies of scale in order to drive prices down for
users and profits up for providers. For example Amazon essentially provides a centralised
cloud consisting of Compute Cloud EC2 and Data Cloud S3. The former is charged based
on per instance-hour consumed for each instance type and the later is charged by per
GB-month of storage used. In addition, data transfer is charged by TB/month data
transfer, depending on the source and target of such transfer. The business model for
grids for academia and government labs is project-oriented in which the users or
community represented by that proposal have certain number of service units (i.e. CPU
hours) they can spend. For example, the TeraGrid operates in this fashion, and requires
increasingly complex proposals be written for increasing number of computational
power. The TeraGrid has more than a dozen grid sites, all hosted at various institutions
around the country (Foster et al., 2008).
134 V. Sharma and G.M.S. Srivastava

5.2 Architecture
Grids define and provide a set of standard protocols, middleware, toolkits, and services
built on top of these protocols. Interoperability and security are the primary concerns for
the grid infrastructure as resources may come from different administrative domains,
which have both global and local resource usage policies, different hardware and
software configurations, platforms, and vary in availability and capacity. Clouds are
developed to address internet-scale computing problems where some assumptions are
different from those of the grids. Clouds are usually referred to as a large pool of
computing and/or storage resources, which can be accessed via standard protocols via an
abstract interface. Clouds can be built on top of many existing protocols such as web
services (WSDL, SOAP), and some advanced Web 2.0 technologies such as REST, RSS,
AJAX, etc. Clouds can exploit existing grid technologies utilising more than a decade of
community efforts in standardisation, security, resource management, and virtualisation
support (Foster et al., 2008).

5.3 Resource management

Talking of computing resources, grids generally use a batch-scheduled compute model, in
which a local resource manager manages the computer resources for a grid site, and users
submit batch jobs to request some resources for some time. Many grids have policies in
place that enforce these batch jobs to identify the user and credentials under which the
job will run for accounting and security purposes, the number of processors needed, and
the duration of the allocation. Due to the expensive scheduling decisions, data staging in
and out, and potentially long queue times, many grids do not natively support interactive
applications; although there are efforts in the grid community to enable lower latencies to
resources via multi-level scheduling to allow applications with many short-running tasks
to execute efficiently on grids (Benioff, 2010). Cloud computing compute model will
likely look very different with resources in the cloud being shared by all users at the same
time in contrast to dedicated resources governed by a queuing system. This should allow
latency sensitive applications to operate natively on clouds, although ensuring a good
enough level of QoS is being delivered to the end users will not be trivial, and will likely
be one of the major challenges for cloud computing as the clouds grow in scale and in
number of users.

5.4 Application model

Grids generally support both HPC and HTC applications but are more efficient at HPC.
HPC applications are efficient at executing tightly coupled parallel jobs within a
particular machine with low-latency interconnects and are generally not executed across a
wide area network grid; these applications typically use message passing interface (MPI)
to achieve the needed inter-process communication. On the other hand, grids have also
seen great success in the execution of more loosely coupled applications that tend to be
managed and executed through workflow systems or other sophisticated and complex
applications (Foster et al., 2008). On the other hand, cloud computing could in principle
cater to a similar set of applications. The one exception that will likely be harder to
achieve in cloud computing as compared to grids are HPC applications that require fast
 Evolution and present status of cloud computing 135

and low latency network interconnects for efficient scaling to many processors. Cloud
applications are generally loosely coupled transaction oriented and likely to be
interactive. Another emerging class of applications in grids is scientific gateways
(Gens, 2010), which are front-ends to a variety of applications that can be anything from
loosely-coupled to tightly-coupled. Clouds seem to have adopted the use of gateways to
cloud resources almost exclusively for end-user interaction.

5.5 Security model

Grids have very strong security measures. The public-key-based GSI protocols are used
for authentication, communication protection, and authorisation. Furthermore,
CAS is designed for advanced resource authorisation within and across communities.
Dumitrescu et al. (2007) say that “Gruber is an example that has distributed policy
enforcement points to enforce both local usage policies and global SLAs which
allow resources at individual sites to be efficiently shared in multi-site, multi-VO
environments”. Currently, the security model for clouds seems to be relatively simpler
and less secure than the security model adopted by grids. Cloud infrastructure typically
rely on web forms (over SSL) to create and manage account information for end-users,
and allows users to reset their passwords and receive new passwords via e-mails in an
unsafe and unencrypted communication. Note that new users could use clouds relatively
easily and almost instantly, with a credit card and/or e-mail address. To contrast this,
grids are stricter about its security. The grid approach to security might be more time
consuming, but it adds an extra level of security to help prevent unauthorised access.
Security for cloud computing is one of the largest concern that need attention (Foster
et al., 2008).

6 Present status of cloud computing

Clouds have made an unprecedented growth in terms of size, popularity, security,

compliance. Survey conducted by RightScale of 1068 Technical Professionals in
February 2014 (RightScale, 2014) says that cloud computing is reaching at ubiquity. It
has been found 94 percent of organisations surveyed are running applications or
experimenting with IaaS which was around 75% in March 2013 survey (Rightscale,
2013). 87% of organisations are using public cloud. Hybrid cloud is becoming the most
preferred option. 74% of enterprises have a hybrid cloud strategy and more than half of
those are already using both public and private cloud. Report says that intensity
of security fear has decreased. Next-generation IT shapes up as cloud + DevOps +
self-service IT. AWS has been found to dominate public cloud adoption, while other
vendors battle for second place. AWS adoption is 54%, about four times more than the
nearest competitor. Rackspace public cloud has been ranked as second within the SMB
segment. IaaS offerings from Google and Microsoft are gaining the interest of Cloud
users, with Azure leading among enterprises and Google Cloud Platform among small
and midsize organisations. Let us compare clouds in 2012 and clouds in 2013 at some
important points. More people have adopted clouds in 2013 as compared to previous
year.
136 V. Sharma and G.M.S. Srivastava

6.1 Adoption and preferences

One of the primary findings of the survey is that cloud computing is no longer on the
bleeding edge of technology adoption. In survey conducted in March 2013, 75% of
respondents were using clouds and in February 2014 survey, in the 12 months since the
last state of the cloud survey, adoption of cloud computing has continued to grow
unabated. Now 94% of respondents report that they are adopting cloud with a strong
tendency towards hybrid cloud. The rate of adoption is slightly higher in enterprises than
it is among small and midsize organisations (SMB) – but although enterprises are moving
into the cloud, they are moving more slowly through the maturity levels. 32% are just at
the experimentation stage, and only 17% report heavy use. The proportions are reversed
for SMBs: 19% are just experimenting, while 41% report heavy use. Clearly enterprises
have moved beyond the question of whether cloud is appropriate for their organisations,
and are progressing down the path to cloud adoption. The slower pace of adoption is in
line with the typical behaviour of large organisations, which are dealing with added
organisational scale and complexity and thus tend to take longer to fully consume new
technologies.

Figure 1 Cloud adoption (see online version for colours)

Figure 2 Cloud preference (see online version for colours)

Enterprises often have different strategies for adopting cloud that incorporate varying
combinations of public, private, and hybrid cloud infrastructure. Enterprises have
multiple choices when it comes to cloud architecture because multiple cloud vendors are
ready to provide services. A hybrid cloud implementation enables organisations to choose
 Evolution and present status of cloud computing 137

the best cloud for each particular application or to span both public and private clouds
with seamless cloud bursting architectures. The 2014 state of the cloud survey shows that
hybrid and multi-cloud implementations continue to be the end goal for enterprises: 74%
of enterprise respondents have a multi-cloud strategy; with 48% are planning for hybrid
clouds, 15% of enterprises expect to use multiple public clouds and 11% are planning for
multiple private clouds.

Figure 3 Cloud preference (see online version for colours)

6.2 Challenges reducing with cloud maturity

Challenges, associated with clouds show a sharp decrease with cloud maturity.
Organisations with more experience in clouds reports fewer challenges with security,
governance, compliance and integration. Security is a significant challenge decreased
from 38% to 31% for cloud beginners over one year and from 18% to 13% for cloud
focused users. While the challenge of cloud security declines with cloud maturity, other
challenges demand attention. In 2013, compliance continues to be an issue on second
position for 18% of cloud focused users, 23% of cloud explorers and 30% of cloud
beginners. Lack of expertise has reduced among all three categories, which means
providers have upgraded themselves upto the expectation of consumers. Control and
Integration to internal systems are other concerns which providers must take care of.
Adopting multiple clouds still poses challenge that requires careful attention of
researchers.

Figure 4 Challenges for cloud beginners (see online version for colours)
138 V. Sharma and G.M.S. Srivastava

Figure 5 Challenges for cloud explorers (see online version for colours)

Figure 6 Challenges for cloud focused users (see online version for colours)

6.3 Cloud benefits

In addition, the percent of all respondents reporting benefits from cloud computing grew
in 2013 over the previous year in a variety of categories, including higher availability
(48% in 2013, 41% in 2012), geographic reach (38% in 2013, 32% in 2012), cost savings
(34% in 2013, 30% in 2012) and business continuity (34% in 2013, 27% in 2012).
Greater cloud experience continues to unlock increasingly greater levels of value for
organisations. Increased benefits of clouds have changed people’s mindset. Earlier people
used to talk of risks associated with clouds, now they talk of benefits that can be drawn
from clouds.
 Evolution and present status of cloud computing 139

Figure 7 Cloud benefits (see online version for colours)

6.4 Cloud security as a significant challenge

While the benefits of the cloud increase with experience, the challenges of clouds
show a sharp decrease as organisations gain expertise with cloud. Security remains the
most-often cited challenge among cloud beginners with 31% but decreases to 13% among
cloud focused organisations. Over the period of one year from 2012 to 2013 it has
decreased moderately. These declines can be attributed to both an increase in security
features of cloud providers as well as increasing availability of information on cloud
security best practices. But still security issue needs special attention for further success
of cloud computing.

Figure 8 Cloud security as a challenge (see online version for colours)

6.5 Private cloud usage

In comparison to 2013 survey, there were noticeable changes in adoption rates of several
private clouds as per 2014 survey. OpenStack adoption went up while VMware vCloud
Director, Citrix CloudStack and Eucalyptus showed decline.
140 V. Sharma and G.M.S. Srivastava

Figure 9 Private cloud usage (see online version for colours)

7 Conclusions

With the rise of this new paradigm, a myriad of terms, concepts, and approaches have
emerged. Although, nearly everybody in the IT sector has been talking of cloud
computing for long time, still doubts existed. But with time and close interaction with
people through numerous surveys, picture is getting clear. Clouds adoption has shown
substantial increase in last one year. With clouds getting matured, people have shown
greater interest in cloud. With increased cloud benefits, people are getting attracted
towards clouds. Security has been a critical issue which should be dealt with strictly in
order to continue cloud computing on path of success. It is expected that coming years
will be time of cloud dominant computing and it will go down in history as the era of the
cloud in the same way that the ‘60s was the era of the mainframe. People are feeling less
reluctant in using clouds as challenges which were earlier associated with clouds are
overtaken by its benefits. Surveys tell that clouds have shown unprecedented popularity
during last two years, but every application is not suitable for clouds. It offers specific
features of which certain applications can profit. Applications that are characterised by
both high computing power and high demand volatility, for example, appear to have great
potential for cloud computing. Mobile interactive applications, parallel batch processing,
data conversion, video rendering or computer animations, software development and
testing, business continuity and disaster recovery are some of the promising domains for
cloud computing.

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