vviewpoints
DOI: 10.1145/1735223.1735234
economic and
Business dimensions
Cloud Computing and electricity:
Beyond the Utility Model
BUsiNesses reLY No less on electricity than on IT. Yet corporations don’t need a “Chief Electricity Officer” anda staffofhighly trained
professionals to manage and integrate
electricity into their businesses. Does
the historical adoption of electricity offer a useful analogy for today’s innovations in cloud computing?
While the utility model offers some
insights, we must go beyond this simple analogy to understand cloud computing’s real challenges and opportunities. Technical issues of innovation,
scale, and geography will confront
managers who attempt to take advantage of offsite resources. In addition,
business model challenges related to
complementarity, interoperability,
and security will make it difficult for
a stable cloud market to emerge. An
overly simplistic reliance on the utility model risks blinding us to the real
opportunities and challenges of cloud
computing.
cloud computing and
the electricity model
Definitions for cloud computing
vary. From a practitioner standpoint:
“Cloud computing is on-demand access to virtualized IT resources that
are housed outside of your own data
center, shared by others, simple to
an overly simplistic
reliance on the utility
model risks blinding
us to the real
opportunities and
challenges of
cloud computing.
use, paid for via subscription, and accessed over the Web.” From an academic perspective: “Cloud computing
refers to both the applications delivered as services over the Internet and
the hardware and systems software
in the data centers that provide those
services. … The data center hardware
and software is what we will call a
cloud. When a cloud is made available
in a pay-as-you-go manner to the public, we call it a public cloud; the service
being sold is utility computing.” 1
Both definitions imply or explicitly
use the “utility” model that embeds the
logic of water supply, electrical grids, or
sewage systems. This model is ubiquitous. While it has important strengths,
it also has major weaknesses.
Hardware providers introduced the
language of “utility” computing into the
market. But perhaps the most rigorous
and vigorous assertion of the electricity model comes from Nicholas Carr,
an independent blogger in his recent
book, The Big Switch: “At a purely eco-
