Chief information officers are more comfortable with the idea of
cloud computing than they were six months ago.
Companies are happy to use the public cloud for software
projects, research and development and to run web marketing
campaigns.
Amazon has been one of the pioneers of cloud computing with
Amazon Web Services (AWS), which provides users with a
relatively low-cost way to access Amazon's vast IT infrastructure
on a pay-per-use basis. Werner Vogels, vice-president worldwide
architecture and chief technology officer at Amazon, has been on a
European tour this week to find out from CIOs what they need from
the public cloud.
He says, "CIOs are now much better informed about the different
cloud computing offerings available. People are using AMS not only
for software development, testing and prottyping new applications,
but also to support collaboration using applications like Microsoft
SharePoint hosted on AWS."
AWS is one of the earliest cloud services and has become popular
with software developers looking to build, test and prototype
applications without having to invest heavily in software
development tools and server infrastructure. "Moving software
development into the cloud is a good way for users to understand
how cloud computing can be used in a production environment," says
Vogels.
He says CIOs are also interested in using the cloud to
facilitate global collaboration. If a collaboration platform such
as Microsoft SharePoint is hosted in the internet cloud, it can be
accessed from anywhere, which makes it far easier for
geographically dispersed teams to work together than if internal IT
was wholly responsible for connecting the users into a shared
workspace.
"Eli Lilly is doing collaborative drug research using external
researchers who collaborate over AWS," says Vogels.
This means that IT does not have to spend months procuring
servers to support collaborative research projects. Vogels says
that on AWS, Eli Lilly is able to set up servers to support the
research projects in a matter of minutes.
Vogels says the cloud has other benefits for collaborative
projects. "You can also tear down the collaborative environment
very quickly. It is easy to restart and there is no need for
up-front IT investment."
Rival drug firm Pfizer is using AWS as a computational grid to
enable it to run programs which analyse the human genome to
identify potential new drugs.
The UK media sector has been a big user of AWS. The Guardian,
Telegraph and Channel 4 used AWS to cover the MPs' expenses scandal
story. Vogels says AWS was used to provide the news sites with the
scalability to support demand if millions of people tried to access
the stories.
Similarly, he says, "Marketing campaigns can attract millions of
customers. In fact, anything that uses social media is going to
succeed." But internal IT may not be able to cope with the huge
peak in website traffic, which Vogels says is where AWS can step in
to provide the extra server capacity to meet demand.
In terms of applications, he says CIOs are putting Windows, open
systems and Linux software on AWS. Commercial software can also be
licensed to run on AWS, although each software firm sets its own
licensing policies.
Oracle users can move their Fusion, eBusiness Suite or Fusion
Middleware licences onto AWS, while IBM charges a small fee on top
of the AWS service for access to DB/2 and WebSphere middleware.
Microsoft SQL Server and Windows Server licences can also be
transferred to the cloud, but users will still require a client
access licence to provide end-users with access to the Microsoft
server software.
Vogels believes the cloud offers businesses a big opportunity to
create their own web services accessible over the internet.
Software companies can provide web services that in-house
applications and commercial products can use to add extra
functionality. He says companies that are not in the IT sector may
see an opportunity to use the cloud to commercialise some of their
internal IT systems as external web services. This is already
happening with the telecommunications companies, but Vogels
believes there is no reason stopping other types business offering
cloud-based web services.
On security, Vogels says Amazon offers the concept of a virtual
private cloud, where users allocate a set of their own IP addresses
to a closed off space on AWS. With a virtual private cloud, IT
management tools such as BMC Patrol, which IT admin staff use to
manage their datacentres and software deployments, also work across
the Amazon cloud. In effect, AWS becomes an extension to the
company's datacentre.
"We offer the concept of regions, which allows CIOs to specify
the geographic location of the servers they use on AWS to support
regulations in different countries," says Vogels.
Furthermore, Vogels says Amazon provides "availability zones",
which give CIOs the option to provide multiple datacentre sites via
the Amazon cloud to support failover and disaster recovery.
"CIOs spend a lot of money on traditional disaster recovery.
With AWS we offer flexibility, allowing them to allocate servers
up-front, which can be used to support disaster recovery. When the
disaster recovery service is not invoked the servers are
reallocated, so they can be used to run applications or software
development."