Is "Cloud" the right Strategy for you ?

These days we hear a lot about “Cloud”, “SAAS” etc.. What would be right strategy for your organization. I think this is something that requires a lengthy debate . But I would like to make it simple for you ? To Start with what is the difference between Cloud and a traditional hosted application .

In a traditional application, the company builds and maintains their own infrastructure , network, servers, and all the underlining software appliances . If the company has operations across the globe, they would need to spend quite a lot fo resources to maintain a scalable application. Maintenance will become a nightmare if the application has a sudden surge in the usage. When you use a Cloud based application you do not need to maintain umpteen number of servers and hardware . The Cloud application service providers provide a way to scale the application depending on the usage and location.

Here is an interesting Youtube video on Cloud Computing.

There’s been lot of discussion around the topic recently and the most recent one worth mentioning was the Structure ‘09 Conference conducted by Gigaom, the premier blogging network.  The industry leaders from IBM, SalesForce, HP, Oracle, Microsoft (Enterprise software companies) , Google, myspace, facebook, twitter (Consumer Web companies) . The Industry Leaders had varying opinion on whether to use cloud or not, whether Cloud is the way to go for all the computing requirements.

You can watch the interesting discussions from the Conference here.

Well the conclusion is , it is mixed depending on your computing need. If you feel your application needs more control and flexibility you are better of running it by yourself. If you have a global application that often requires scalability changes you are better of putting it on the Cloud. In a later topic I will cover the various Cloud computing providers and what are their core capabilities ?