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The Pros and Cons of Cloud Computing

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The Pros and Cons of Cloud Computing A Tale of a Salesman that Convinced a CIO to Switch to Cloud Computing 1 – Introduction and Definition P.2 2 – Pros and Cons of Cloud Computing, from a CIO – Salesman Point of View P.4 3 – Conclusion P.8 4 – References P.9 1.1 Introduction “Cloud” computing is the fanciest buzzword in the computer industry, currently surpassing the last big term “web 2.0”. Every big player in the computer industry launched a cloud service last year. Notable examples are iCloud by Apple, (Apple 2012) or Microsoft Cloud Services (Microsoft 2011), copying various innovators like Google or Dropbox, who offer similar services since much longer. The latter is the most successful …show more content…

Google App Engine, Microsoft Azure • Infrastructure as a service (IaaS), Servers & DBs like Amazon S3 for enterprises. Furthermore, different deployment models exist, we are going to focus only on the two different poles, the private cloud and the public cloud. The former means that the cloud infrastructure is owned and operated by a single and usually the same organization, while the latter stands for a public infrastructure where basically everyone can use it under different conditions. And this is the “cloud” we will be referring to in this essay. Businesses can “outsource” the different services to other firms, by engaging into a business client relationship. This has three important implications from a hardware point of view: (Armbrust 2009). 1. “The illusion of infinite computing resources available on demand” - in contrast to the limited in-house servers, the businesses don’t need to plan on how much computer power they need beforehand. 2. “The elimination of an up-front commitment by Cloud users” - a business can start small, the resources are always perfectly adapted to their needs. Or in other words, the elasticity is very high. 3. “The ability to pay for use of computing resources on a short-term basis as needed” – which is much more cost-efficient than having servers running all time – using more storage room and electricity. Those three points are quite evident, so why do businesses still settle for private cloud infrastructure? There are many

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