Bladewatch.com

ZDnet

At the end of October 2007, amid a blaze of publicity, Microsoft launched Azure, its cloud computing service. It offers customers the ability to deploy applications across the Internet–or ‘the cloud’ as it has become known–or on servers located on the customer’s site, or via a combination of the two.

In doing so Microsoft is responding to the competitive challenges put down by Amazon, Google and others who offer similar products.

The essence of cloud computing is the delivery of software as an on-demand service, which is available without the customer’s involvement with or control over the underlying IT infrastructure.

Despite the idea being around for a while–software-as-a-service goes back to application service providers and their numerous similarities with outsourcing–selling cloud computing to financial services firms could seem problematic. The sector is renowned for its reluctance to give up control over operations, which is exactly what is involved with the cloud. Added to this is a mountain of regulation.

However, early indications are that FS organizations are warming to cloud computing. The technique of converting remote servers into shared resources is being applied by Merrill Lynch to create an energy-saving risk management platform, and Wall Street’s new hosted Electronic Settlement Network offers pay-as-you-go FX trade processing.

Check out this article talking about cloud computing, it’s an interesting read. I wonder how long it will be before we see more mainstream adoption of this within the enterprise and SME sectors? Certainly there are many organizations and people using it on a day to day process, will we see specific areas of growth or demand in terms of applications and services? Could a VMware disaster recovery cloud be the business opportunity of 2009?

Rather than me rent a data center, can I rent 100 virtual machines, I’ll give you the specifications, you provision it and I can then have BCP/disaster recovery without the associated costs?

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.