eGov-Jan-2011-[46-47]-Developing World's IT Maker-Samia Melhem

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opinion

cloud computing

Samia Melhem Sr Operation Officer, The World Bank

Developing world’s IT maker Cloud computing can jumpstart governments with IT without requiring them to make huge investments in infrastructure

E

very now and then the IT world produces catchy buzz words appealing to the closet poet in some of us—killer app, WYSIWYG, TCOO, petaflop, and so on. One of the latest ones—listed under the Global Language Monitor 2008 list of most confusing buzz words—is cloud computing, followed by an older relative grid computing and three related acronyms, software as a service (SaaS), infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS). Cloud computing allows companies and enterprises to move applications, networking, services and computing infrastructure they currently have on premise to a virtual environment ‘out there’ on the Internet. That virtual environment is actually running in some data center in large server farms shared for different applications and clients (virtualisation is the buzz word to use here). With IaaS, customers get on-demand computing and storage to host, scale, and manage applications and services through cloud vendors’ data centres. This allows customers to scale with ease and quickly meet the infrastructure needs of

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an entire organisation or an individual department, either globally or locally. EMC, HP, CRM, Google, Verizon are examples of IaaS providers. For the customer, say a government or a private enterprise, there is no need to buy and maintain servers, data centres, or to build backup and redundancy infrastructure. PaaS customers get the operating system, a fully relational database, and consumable Web-based services that provide security-enhanced connectivity and federated access control for applications. IBM, CSCO, VMW and Oracle are examples of PaaS providers. For the customer, there is no need to buy operating systems, database or Web service licenses. SaaS online services are subscriptionbased, on-demand applications and hosted services, providing end users with a consistent experience across various client devices. Microsoft SharePoint Online is an example of such a service. Google, Amazon, SalesForce.com, IBM, Zoho and CRM are examples of SaaS cloud providers.

Cloud is big, getting bigger Cloud computing has become serious business. According to latest Gartner reports, worldwide cloud services reve-

IT infrastructure, platforms or software applications can be delivered as a service, obviating the need to set up data centres or to buy licenses

nue was forecasted to reach $68.3 billion by end of 2010, a 16.6 percent increase from 2009 revenue of $58.6 billion. Worldwide cloud service revenue is projected to reach $148.8 billion in 2014. Gartner estimates that, over the course of the next five years, enterprises will spend $112 billion cumulatively on SaaS, PaaS and IaaS put together. North American and European markets represent the largest markets from a geographic perspective. The US share of the worldwide cloud services market was 60 percent in 2009 and would be 58 percent in 2010, but by 2014, according to Gartner, this will be diluted to 50 percent as other countries and regions begin to adopt cloud services in more-significant volumes. Western Europe was expected to account for 23.8 percent of the cloud services market in 2010, and Japan 10 percent. In 2014, the UK is forecast to account for 29 percent of the market, while Japan will represent 12 percent of cloud service revenues. In the last few years, a whole new industry based on cloud computing marketing, promotion, operation and maintenance has transformed the IT industry and its media machine. New companies are born, new jobs are being


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