Cloud Computing Business model
The business model of a cloud clearly facilitates more efficient use of existing resources. Clouds can require users to commit to predefined start and end dates for resource requests. This helps IT organizations to more efficiently repurpose resources that often get forgotten or go unused. When users realize they can get resources within minutes of a request, they are less likely to hoard resources that are otherwise very difficult to acquire. Clouds provide request-driven, dynamic allocation of computing resources for a mix of workloads on a massively scalable, heterogeneous and virtualized infrastructure. The value of a fully automated provisioning process that is security compliant and automatically customized to user's needs results in:
The cloud computing model reduces the need for capacity planning at the application level. The user of an application can request resources from the cloud and obtain them in less than an hour. A user who needs more resources can submit another request and obtain more resources within minutes, and in a policy-based system, no interaction is needed at all; resource changes are performed dynamically. Consequently, it is far less important to accurately predict the capacity requirements for an application than it is in traditional data centers, and capacity planning is simplified because it is performed only once for the entire data center.
Today's IT realities make cloud computing a good fit for meeting the needs of both IT providers (who demand unprecedented flexibility and efficiency, lower costs and complexity and support for varied and huge workloads) and Internet users (who expect availability, function and speed). As technology such as virtualization and corresponding management services like automation, monitoring and capacity planning services become more mature, cloud computing will become more widely used for increasingly diverse and even mission-critical workloads.