Another mind-numbing meeting last night with a cloud company.  Oddly, one of the longer discussions we had dealt with the social and economic benefits of cloud computing.

The average IT installation for even small companies requires quite a bit of dedicated IT facility/room space for housing servers, uninterruptable power supplies, switches, routers, and other network support equipment.  In addition to the value of space consumed by storage systems and applications servers, there is normally a fairly high cost associated with electricity and cooling needed to keep the equipment operating.

Most corporate IT equipment runs at a very low level of efficiency.  This means that, for example, servers are designed for peak traffic and processing requirements, which may only occur once a day or even once a month.  The rest of the time those servers are running at between 5~10% of their actual processing capacity. 

Storage is a very similar proposition.  Disk looks cheap these days, so many companies are buying individual personal computers and storage systems with tremendous amounts of space - with actual usage in the less than 25% range.  Main problem with this might be in the cost of electricity required to power the disk systems, and the cost to the company intellectual property if the disk system is not properly maintained and backed up.

Cloud computing solves many of these problems by averaging the usage of compute and storage capacity over many different users, trying to bring the average utilization up to a level of around 80%  While this may draw more electricity (and subsequent cooling load) for the cloud system, the incremental increase in power usage is still a small fraction of the aggregate of having multiple individual IT systems.

As cloud provisioning platforms continue to make the set up of 3rd party data center outsourcing more simple and more transparent - as well as enhancing the physical (i.e., physical access, backup and availability) and logical security of IT systems, the cloud companies are actually providing a powerful argument for outsourcing corporate data centers into a high performance cloud.  The overall cost to the environment, not to mention a company's bottom line by reducing the cost of IT equipment and data center space, do make a very interesting and compelling argument for connecting to clouds.

Think about it, and let us know your opinions by adding comments to this blog, or sending me a note at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it  .