So what is cloud computing?

As the IT operations continue to evolve and transform the business
towards agility and adaptability to ever changing rules of marketplace, the
efficiency of any IT operation is of paramount significance. The phrase ‘time to
market’ has a completely new meaning in today’s dynamic business environment
where the only constant is change. This rapidly changing environment has lead
the IT and business leaders alike to re-think the ‘procurement to provisioning’
process with one goal in mind – Efficient use of resources. These resources
include IT assets such as hardware and software, human capital such as
administrators, developers, testers, other IT management staff and facilities
employed in hosting the overall IT infrastructure. The efficiency goals are not
only towards costs savings but also are defined by the business requirement
usually driven by external market forces and availability of various enabling
technologies. Cloud computing as a platform is amalgamation of such enabling
technologies. While the concept of cloud computing is not new, efforts such as
net(work) computing and various hardware and software virtualization
technologies in the past have attempted to address the need for ‘unlimited’
resource pool capable of handling varying workloads. These efforts, while did
contribute towards a more mature cloud platform, as a singular technology it did
fall short of a vision of a true cloud computing platform.
So what is a cloud computing platform? Is it simply automated
provisioning systems coupled with a resource virtualization, where the workload
is policy driven, and resources over committed and any resource contention
handled by policy driven resolution? As it turns out technologies that provide
provisioning, virtualization and policy enforcement form the building blocks of a
true cloud computing platform, but not any one technology is a cloud offering in
and of it self.