Cloud Adoption

Most likely area of Cloud adoption for Enterprises:

Cloud presents many value propositions. Although it has been widely adopted with small and medium businesses, it has not been widely adopted by large enterprises due to a variety of reasons, such as data security/privacy and service level agreements.

We work with many of our clients to educate them on the true risk of Cloud, guide them realize the full benefits of Cloud,  and help them transition from the current Enterprise architecture to the Cloud architecture. Below are a few examples where I think Cloud is most likely be widely adopted first in large enterprises. 

• 1. Email storage outsourcing. Email is a central collaboration tools for workers. Unfortunately, the cost is too high to store and maintain an email infrastructure. Cloud presents strong value propositions in this area. For example, Google Apps charges $50/year for up to 25GB of storage. But to adopt Google Apps, a company has to switch to a totally different system, i.e., Gmail vs. MS Exchange. Alternatively, companies are looking into leveraging Amazon's S3 storage service at $0.15/GB/month even cheaper. A Cloud email startup is working on an Outlook attachment remover/extractor which can put email attachments in S3. Thus, an large enterprise does not need to change their email infrastructure and still reap the benefits of the Cloud.

  2. Large scale data processing. Enterprises have a growing amount of data, and it is expensive to provision many servers to process them. Amazon EC2 presents a quick and cheap way to provision a large amount of computing power quickly. To leverage many servers, companies are looking to utilize the Hadoop platform, or the GridBatch platform we developed.

  3. Distributed testing. Testing infrastructure is expensive and it is only used for a short period. Having a fixed infrastructure does not make economical sense. A company could use Jmeter to quickly set up a testing infrastructure on EC2 and have a very large scale testing.