Cloud Computing—Increasing Capacity without Increasing Costs

As with many emerging technologies it starts with a distant voice. It has a cool-sounding name and it starts to come up in articles and conversations but only peripherally. Cloud computing fits the model as I’ve heard it come up several times but what exactly is it? What is it not? According to Wikipedia it’s the use of virtualization technologies to simplify the data center. There is some disagreement over what cloud computing actually means. Some take it for anything outside their own companies system, while others define it more narrowly as utility computing. The benefits are clear – it provides additional bandwidth without having to invest into additional infrastructure. The upshot of it is that it will most definitely change the way companies handle IT. In this article the author predicts the transformation of the IT industry by shifting the infrastructure within a company to outside. Just as Software as a Service model has shifted software sales from perpetual license models to pay-by-the-drip models, so the core IT infrastructure will follow the same path.

Current reviews of the technology show that as an emerging technology it appeals to small and startup companies but not the large enterprise user yet which parallels most emerging technologies in that it leverages the newer business models more so than the established ones. The primary advantage is the lower cost. While the previous article focuses on IT applications, virtual instrumentation applications could also make use of cloud computing for data storage and test applications.

For virtual instrumentation, the IT infrastructure is a part of many applications for data storage, reporting, and analysis of data. As the cost comes down and the access to capacity goes up, this should provide an improvement in ROI for virtual instrumentation-based projects.

Best regards,
Hall T.