There is a lot of confusion and ambiguity currently about what constitutes "cloud computing", and what all can be included in this umbrella term. For example, some definitions include SAAS applications, IT infrastructure on demand, live data, and even human resources available from a "people cloud" such as what LiveOps is doing with telephone operators on demand and "remote agents." Even the experts don't agree what is and is not included in the definition of the cloud. So an example might be helpful to understand at least one aspect of the cloud and one interpretation of it.
Now, there are a lot of pure "IT resource clouds" out there to limit the conversation to a more narrow definition of the cloud. Examples include Amazon's S3 and EC2, Rackspace's Cloud Servers, storage clouds from companies such as Sun, EMC, and IBM, and others that are essentially servers that can utilized as needed and more efficiently than in the past to handle usage spikes. So whereas before you paid for fixed servers by the month (and typically 12-month contracts), you can now pay by the minute without a lengthy contract and as needed. But at the end of the day, it's still just a server. You still have to build the applications from scratch that leverage these elastic resources. So by limiting the concept of cloud computing to just these types of technologies I think sells the concept short.
Where the cloud becomes especially interesting is where there is actual business resources that can be utilized (such as our very own IronCloud offering), especially where activities and business processes that traditionally have been done in-house can be moved to the cloud with relative ease. This expands cloud computing to more of an outsourcing phenomenon, rather than just a leveraging of Web-based resources such as servers and databases.
For a simple example, consider the calculation of sales tax during an ecommerce transaction. Each time an ecommerce transaction occurs, the proper sales tax rate needs to be applied (in many cases) for a legal transaction to occur.
In order to achieve this requirement, you basically have two choices. You can go the traditional route and buy a tax rate database in a flat file and manage the storage, accessibility, and ongoing data updates as they occur. Or, you could recognize that compiling, managing, supporting, and delivering sales tax rates to your own Website is not a core competency and outsource it by tapping into a "sales tax rate cloud" at a fraction of the cost and complexity.
In the latter case, every time an ecommerce transaction occurs on your site, simply include an instruction to send the physical address of the customer via an XML message (SOAP or REST call) to the sales tax rate cloud and instantaneously receive the appropriate sales tax rate. In a flash, the appropriate tax rate can be delivered and used to calculate a final price for the transaction, with zero management of sales tax rate data, ongoing updates, hardware, etc.. - just a simple XML message requesting an answer from the great sales tax rate cloud in the sky - even while you sleep. How and when the tax rate data gets updated is completely transparent to you as a consumer, as it should be since your core business is unlikely to include the aggregation of sales tax rates from multiple jurisdictions and the internal infrastructure and resources to support it.
As a data services cloud player, StrikeIron offers several sales tax rate services out in the cloud and available for use, from basic sales tax rates for US & Canada that are useful in some scenarios, to comprehensive sales tax rate data services that handle fine granularity of tax jurisdictions, product-dependent tax rates, tax holidays, and more.
This is one way to think of the cloud, specifically oriented towards utilizing external data from an external source via the cloud, rather than absorbing the cost of doing it internally and simplifying your operations. There are lots of clouds in the sky such as this one, not just one big resource cloud solely dedicated to virtual servers. You can make rain by using the appropriate clouds for your business, as many more are emerging on the horizon.
