VoIP Industry Newsletter: Understanding the Impact of Cloud Computing for VoIP

VOICE FROM THE INDUSTRY

If you listen to reports from the Cloud computing industry, you are probably confused by now. Larry Ellison makes fun of ‘cloud’ as a branding technique, serious government agencies launch serious initiatives to use or harness the ‘cloud’, and we all know someone who uses a server that they don’t own or manage which, technically, probably is a ‘cloud’ service. In this piece, I’d like to provide some of the broadest definitions for Cloud Computing and take a look at how what they mean is indeed different from all of the things ‘cloud’ used to be called.

For a definition, the National Institute of Standards and Technology is a good place to start.

Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.

Another source is the Yankee Group. I recently attended a great webinar called “Pinning Down the Cloud,” where Yankee Group analysts defined the ‘cloud’ as “…scalable, virtualized information services provided on demand over the Internet with multitenant capability, service-level agreements (SLAs) and usage-based pricing.”

This is essentially the same definition as the NIST definition but with a hint at the pricing model.

So what is the big deal about the ‘cloud’? It sounds like a rehash of ASP, Hosted, Managed Services and SaaS. What do these services really offer?

Two real advantages I have seen currently available in the ‘cloud’ pertain to CPU and server storage. Amazon, with its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), has for a number of years been building a virtualized server infrastructure in the ‘cloud’. The company claims that with Amazon Web Services (AWS), customers can “requisition computing power, storage, and other services–gaining access to a suite of elastic IT infrastructure services as your business demands them.” EMC and others have pioneered ‘cloud’ data storage, where meta-data files allow information to be maintained over a cloud of dispersed servers on demand. The advantages gained through cloud servers, and cloud storage-as-services that live up to the new ‘cloud’ moniker, are that businesses can flexibly choose development platforms or programming models, and then scale growth in a cost-effective manner respective to company need. Elasticity, then, is the operative word regarding CPU and server capacity. And in both realms, growth and flexibility are infinite and on-demand, seemingly, providing cost-effective options for growing businesses. This is where the noteworthy values lie for companies hoping to explore full- or partially virtualized infrastructures.

There are a lot of examples of services using the word cloud but which look suspiciously like managed services or SaaS. The problem in VoIP, for instance, is that it is very difficult to virtualize use of server resources for specialized applications that require complex and/or numerous settings manipulations. There is also the issue of the network that ties together VoIP services in the cloud: What are the fundamental components? Who are service providers? Are they reliable? What is the “glue” that holds them together in a coherent fashion? So, in other words, not all clouds are created equal.

One idea gaining traction in the market is that the private cloud will provide an interim way for businesses to tap the power and savings in specific areas like telephony. Managed IP bandwidth starts to make sense for using federations of cloud services. Mike Altendorf, founder of Conchango, in a recent CIO Magazine article commented on the promise and limitations of the private cloud. Altendorf’s piece essentially validates larger scale adoption of cloud computing models, saying that the cost savings make it work, but we should look for ‘private cloud’ groupings of IT services providers in the near term.

Whether public or private, the cloud seems to offer a versatile and cost-efficient model for certain types of services. To determine which IT services might prosper in a ‘cloud’ model, it is valuable to look to those that adapt easily to virtualization because of inefficient patterns of usage or to those that have better version releases frequently. One example might even be as basic as dial tone—cloud dial tone. I suspect there are other instances, and would like to open up the conversation to you. I would like to hear your ideas on this and other areas where you think VoIP and the Cloud will shape the future of telephony.

Richard Scullin,

Founder, www.MobileEd.org

richard@mobileed.org

Print Email Download PDF <<   1 2 3 4 5 6   >>