What is Cloud Computing?

WIKIPEDIA DEFINITION:

Cloud Computing is a style of computing wherein dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet. Cloud users need not have knowledge of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure in the “cloud” that supports them.

Personal Version:

Whether you realize it or not, you are most likely already using cloud computing on a personal level. Cloud computing is actually a service that is being provided to your computer.  Gmail or GoogleDocs is a prime example. Personal cloud computing provides every slice of data you require for any aspect of your life. These data slices at your fingertips, are ready for instant use.

Business Version:

As with the personal cloud, businesses have been adopting the cloud by choosing to place their aggregate information with a cloud provider, thus allowing the organization’s employee groups and/or customers to access their information under the cloud umbrella.

There are a number of cloud providers such as Amazon’s EC2, Microsoft’s Azure, Google’s App Engine, Apple’s iCloud and more. MatterMax Media will discuss a cost analysis for business cloud computing in next Thursday's blog, “Cloud Solutions”, the second installment of this series.

Now that we have a basic understanding of what constitutes cloud computing, let's move on to examining how adopting the cloud will impact the user experience.

Web Performance:

Today’ s businesses and consumers expect rapidly increased speed to deliver complex, media-rich web applications. The response time/speed at which services are delivered to an end user is a critical metric for any organization.

There are few cloud providers that currently offer performance metrics for the end user experience, which is the area your business or IT department should be using to measure performance metrics. However, even fewer cloud providers offer Service Level Agreements (SLAs) based on web performance.

Three Critical Areas:

Compuware conducted performance tests to evaluate several major cloud service providers. The results of these tests revealed the following performance gaps, which best-in-class businesses would find unacceptable:

1. Cloud providers demonstrated wide gaps in web site performance metrics across geographic regions, with some major cities delivering end-user response times as much as 10 times slower than others.
2. Elasticity results [the capability of a cloud to scale up rapidly] showed some cloud requests may not ramp at speeds that fulfill audience requests.
3. Numerous cloud services indicated performance problems (e.g. slow, missing content and functionality) at the edge of the Internet. This is where customers live. Therefore these types of problems would impact visitor behavior and conversions.

Outside In:

MatterMax Media recommends regularly testing and monitoring your cloud-based web applications from your users’ perspective: from the outside-in. Why? Three primary reasons:

1. Lack of control over cloud services
2. The inability of SLAs to guarantee performance levels
3. The absence of detailed monitoring of a cloud’s implicit or explicit benefits

Web applications are what the end user sees and experiences, therefore, web performance metrics must be obtained from the end user point of view, i.e., outside-in. Only detailed Last Mile measurements, (user experiences) tuned to the needs of your business, can form the basis of your assessment of cloud services.

Best Practices being embraced by Best-In-Class companies using cloud services include:

1. Get a clear understanding on the pros and cons of your organization engaging the cloud. Your company should have specific reasons for using the cloud. This might include reducing total cost of ownership, streamlining the IT department, or maintaining a cloud-bursting solution to handle spikes in demand.
2. Know your Customers. Where are they located? What times of day do they visit your site? What are the peak seasonal traffic times? Which ISPs do they use? What device do they use to connect to the Internet? What browser and Operating System combination do they use?
3. Implement an outside-in user point-of-view approach to web performance monitoring and testing. The speed at which the end user experiences your web site may be the most critical aspect of your business. It is vital to measure customer experience from the customer perspective, once you know understand your customers and their tendencies.
4. Know your business capacity requirements. As we discussed earlier, the elasticity benefit of the cloud conveys an implied performance capability. It is essential to test this area to ensure these implied benefits apply to the real-world demands of your organization.
5. Demand that SLAs carry a web performance guarantee based on your needs. If your organization is considering the cloud, you are in a strong position to demand performance guarantees. If more companies demand web performance SLAs, vendors will be compelled to provide such guarantees.

Today’s Web Experience Challenges:

All in all, the benefits of the cloud are hard to dismiss: pay-per-use billing, flexibility, scalability, burstable capacity, agility and the hope that your IT team will experience fewer headaches.

Even though the word “cloud” describes a model that offers complex web infrastructure as turnkey services, there is the implication that an issue revolving around a lack of control exists within the cloud offering. That lack of control tends to make a CIO or an IT administrator very nervous.

MatterMax Media understands that we live in a world where many components of your web application delivery consists of third-party vendors, multiple data centers, external ad networks and content delivery networks (CDNs) that are located outside of your firewall and that are not under your direct control.

Further, IT managers are now being required to migrate entire web infrastructures to the cloud. This extends the distance between their team and the team’s ability to monitor and directly respond to critical components of the web application delivery chain.

In addition, the demanding end user wants to experience rich web sites at lightning speed in a real-time world. New polls consistently demonstrate that consumers will leave a web page that takes longer than four seconds to load.

With this basic understanding of cloud computing and web experience challenges, you are ready to take the next steps to uncover some “cloud solutions.”

See you next week at Today’s Marketing Blog’s Thursday Edition, where we will present Part 2 of the “Head In the Cloud” series, “Cloud Solutions.”

MatterMax Media is a full service integrated marketing agency located in Stone Mountain, Georgia.  MatterMax Media provides strategy, technology, marketing and training for individuals, businesses and government.  Today’s Marketing Blog focuses on Entrepreneurship, Marketing and Web Matters.  When you require assistance with your website creation, branding/marketing strategy, feel free to contact us.