Benefits of a Cloud Based Architecture

In the fourth of his five-part series, Eric Strause explores the hardware and application benefits inherent in a cloud-based architecture.

Transcript:

Today we're going to talk about a cloud architecture and the benefits and challenges that a cloud architecture brings.

In a cloud based environment, we have an opportunity as it relates to hardware ROI and also application ROI. But there are also some challenges that come along in a cloud environment as well.

In this particular environment here, what we're doing is we're leveraging any asset in an infrastructure to enable customers to reach the applications — whatever application that might be. And we separate hardware and processing and storage power so that the application is reached by whatever user based on their profiles and permissions.

The beauty of this particular model is that you get much more efficient in terms of your hardware utilization. Instead of a siloed approach, you now have ultimately a server farm that you're able to reach through and acquire the services that are necessary. It's far easier to manage, it's easier to deploy, because you can now compartmentally add or increase as you need to. You could, for example, just add more servers as processing power becomes constrained, you could add more storage capacity as storage capacity becomes constrained, and you're separating the processes.

From an application perspective there's also an ROI story because now leveraging an SOA based model, or a service oriented architecture, you now have a more efficient way to go build and archive and create and leverage from an application development perspective so that you're not repeating the same processes over and over again.

From an application perspective, one of the benefits that you start to see is faster application deployment because now when it comes to turning on a new application, you're not waiting for an infrastructure team to come in and turn up a new stack of services for you. You now simply can turn your application on inside the cloud and the processing will enable it to be reached as the cloud team is managing or the infrastructure team is managing these assets and demand and bandwidth.

The challenge that cloud brings to the table is really an organizational transformation. It's a transformation for applications teams, it's a transformation for IT network infrastructure teams.