Cloud computing has many advantages from a business perspective

From a business perspective, Cloud Computing has many advantages: a virtualized infrastructure allows the collection of arithmetic and storage resources as required. In peak times, additional capacity can be booked and reduced at a lower capacity.


Each provider maintains their own technologies


The fast and flexible provision of resources is an important feature. In the best case, according to the expectations, individual departments are able to order their currently required IT performance from any cloud provider. The vendor will take care of the technical details.


Connecting Cloud Services


An example of this is Salesforce.com. The company provides Web-based applications for customer relationship management (CRM) over the Internet, which are used by many customers worldwide in the form of software as a service (SaaS).


Initiatives and alliances


Other well-known representatives of public clouds are the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3). The public cloud offer on the one hand is supplemented by a multitude of private clouds from companies, where applications and services are provided via the company-owned LAN / WAN. If the performance of the internal cloud is no longer sufficient, it would be desirable to be able to use additional resources of public clouds.


Conclusion


This is where the Krux starts: Since Cloud Computing is a still young technology, no generally accepted standards have yet been developed. Many proprietary technology suppliers follow their own ideas about how a cloud should be driven, operated and managed by application vision.


If users benefit from such a manufacturer-specific cloud platform, they are exposed to the ideas of the technology provider - and they can change dramatically over two or three years. What is mostly missing from the user's perspective, but also from a developer's perspective, is a linkage of different cloud platforms.


Cloud computing represents a fundamental change in a functional model where applications are no longer stored separately on individual hardware components and resources are used more flexibly than before.


In addition, the development and consumption model is changing fundamentally: hard-wired, proprietary connections between software components and users of these components are replaced by compact web services and software access over the Internet.


The most important components to move existing applications from one to another cloud provider or even to create a co-operation between multiple vendors are


The basic idea of ​​Cloud Computing is convincing, but still hesitate with companies with a wide-area deployment. The reasons for this can be very individual: some have security concerns, others fear the dependency on the manufacturer.


As a promising recipe to advance in such situations, the definition of standards and guidelines has often been established by independent institutions and mixed producer-user bodies.


Standards serve as a prerequisite for implementing certain interfaces. If the manufacturers of hardware, network components and software follow the guidelines, companies are also willing to accept the offer because they benefit from it.


As a major standardization activity in the field of virtualization and cloud, three initiatives are particularly worth mentioning:


Especially in the area of ​​Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and in public Clouds, operators without virtualization are not enough. OVA's mission is to promote kernel-based virtual machine hypervisor technology (KVM) as an open alternative to proprietary virtualization solutions.


The Open Cloud Initiative is committed to open standards for cloud computing and thus aims to enable more interoperability. The OCI has clear notions about open standards: they must be documented, published and accessible and freely usable.


In contrast to many other standardization bodies, the Open Datacenter Alliance offers both manufacturers and users. Another difference is that you do not want to define standards but describe the challenges in applications.


Examples are ways to move applications and infrastructures between different clouds, as well as the associated interoperability and cross-platform management requirements.


As the IT infrastructure of enterprises currently and in the future includes numerous components of many hardware and software developers, standardization activities are an important contribution towards interoperability. Vendors of open source software are a decisive step ahead of the proprietary warehouse because they already work with open interfaces and standards and not with highly integrated blackboxes that "lock" users into an isolated system world.