Cloud Computing:

Wishful Thinking or a Viable Alternative?

By

Paul Gillespie

Graduate student

University of Maryland, University College

IMAT 670

Abstract. The Internet is permeating all aspects of our lives. This includes business and organizational endeavors as well as our personal lives. Businesses have become to depend on the Internet for their supply chain, advertising, and sales. E-commerce has experienced a tremendous growth in the last decade. Organizations are looking for new ways to leverage the Internet for business growth. Web Services is a growing technology in the Information Systems field. Data Management is also an ever-increasing endeavor for many organizations. The need for information is …show more content…

The customer pays only for the resources use and can scale up or down as needed. The next level or layer is the web development platform. An example is Google’s App Engine where web developers can upload computer code and rely on Google’s infrastructure to deploy the application and allocate computer resources. The third level is running application enterprises in the cloud. A cloud vendor can take over an organizations enterprise and manage the availability and performance of the enterprise. E-mail may be the most likely and common enterprise to be managed by cloud computing (Weinberg, 2008, p. 5). The table below provides a comparison between cloud computing and traditional computing.

| |Traditional Computing |Cloud Computing |
|Acquisition |Buy assets and build technical architecture |Buy service |
|Model | | |
|Business |Pay for fixed assets and administrative |Pay based on use |
|Model |overhead | |