The five defining characteristics of cloud computing

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What it (REALLY) means to you.

"Characteristic 1: Dynamic computing infrastructure
The infrastructure must deliver business value" (profit for the investor) "over and above the investment" (it will cost you a lot).

"Characteristic 2: IT service-centric approach" (SELF-service - in "pre-defined" automated environment)

"Characteristic 3: Self-service based usage model" (you're on your own, baby)(Don't expect any help from the application provider.)
"...more self service that can be delegated to users, less administrative (human) involvement is necessary. This saves time and money and allows administrative staff to focus on more strategic, high-valued responsibilities" (on things where we are forced to provide actual human service). (Lot's of profit because we won't have to offer any contact information or customer support - the user is on his/her own. We can just collect the money on this and use our human resources on other profitable projects where we can't yet ignore the user.)

"Characteristic 4: Minimally or self-managed platform" (all mechanized and automated) (Minimizes human involvement - lets mechanized automation "take care of you" - so the provider can use his employees to focus on making money elsewhere instead of on supporting you and/or his applications that you use/rent).


"Characteristic 5: Consumption-based billing" (you pay them every time you use any little piece of the application - every time you edit a document, for instance, you have to pay for the minutes used.) (This would be a minute-by-minute fee in addition to an overall monthly "access" fee for the priviledge of "accessing" the application (such as Word) at all.

"The value here from a user?s perspective is the ability for them to pay only for the resources they use, ultimately helping them keep their costs down" (right - their business model is designed around saving YOU money - and I want to sell you a bridge in Brooklyn). "From a provider?s perspective, it allows them to track usage for charge back and billing purposes" (it allows them to collect money for every minute you spend editing a document while providing you with nothing other than ACCESS to a completely mechanized, automated system - no customer service).

And Charactistic 6 is the kicker - if you ever decide to close the money-bleed artery in your arm and stop paying rent just for "access" to the application (in order to rack up expensive minutes), well then, you ALSO LOSE ACCESS to all your documents that you created while you were paying rent. Which probably doesn't matter because they are in a format that nothing else can read anyway, even if you did have access to them.

Posted by: maggietoo9   Posted on: 04/10/09 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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