From the Editors: Google ascends into the cloud
By SD Times News Team
May 1, 2008 —
(Page 1 of 2)
To get a sense of Google’s size, consider this: If you google “Google,” you get 2.1 billion search results. Google “God,” and you get merely 486 million. Now, Google wouldn’t claim to be four times more popular than the Almighty, of course, but perhaps the company is moving into His lofty neighborhood: the cloud.
Recently, Google placed two big bets that computing is indeed moving up into the cloud. First, it is partnering with Salesforce to put its Google Apps portfolio onto Salesforce’s SaaS platform. Second, it offers a preview release of App Engine, which will let software developers create applications and host them on Google’s massive infrastructure.
BusinessWeek called this cloud strategy “Google’s Next Dream” in a Dec. 24, 2007 cover story, showing that this capability affects far more than IT departments. When executed properly, cloud computing saves enterprises the hassle of figuring out how many servers they need to provision, how much space they have or how much electricity they can afford.
While computing power as a service isn’t a new notion, modern uber-companies such as Google are in the best position to be the computing infrastructure for others. Another big player is Amazon.com and its Elastic Compute Cloud service. Salesforce.com also has its platform, The Force.
Just as important as being able to scale up computing resources as needed, an enterprise also must be able to scale down. This avoids the situation where different departments in an organization hoard servers or storage in case they need them, even though they haven’t used such storage in months. In today’s ultracompetitive economy, being able to scale down is one of cloud computing’s most compelling boardroom arguments.
To be sure, some of those clouds look dark and threatening to others. Many organizations are rightfully skittish about yielding control over their computing resources to an outsider—any outsider. Google’s vaunted “Don’t be evil” pledge does not reassure skeptics who worry how well Google, or any other cloud-computing provider, would safeguard their data.
Related Search Term(s): Cloud computing, Google, multicore
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