Benefits of Cloud Computing

Cloud Computing

Ericsson opted for Amazon Web Services (AWS) because of several features that AWS offered. There is no evidence presented in this case study with respect to the actual accrued benefits that Ericsson enjoyed. Furthermore, the information is presented by Amazon, who is selling this service. That makes this a source completely lacking in credibility. But Amazon does offer that "Ericsson explains that is has several Software as a Service initiatives that have or will soon need an infrastructure as a service provider." This does not really tell us anything -- we know that Ericsson believes it needs AWS because it paid for it. One of the stated benefits for Ericsson is that AWS gives it multiple global hosting centers -- this might well be a benefit of other providers but it is definitely a benefit of AWS that Ericsson felt was critical. This is one of the major benefits of cloud computing, because it means that the company is not reliant on a single location for its data storage needs. One location is risky because if that location was damaged with fire or natural disaster the company's data could be compromised at the worst or suffer downtime at the least. So cloudy computing through something like AWS would allow Ericsson to diversify the physical locations of its data storage, for a higher level of security.

While not stated in the case, we know that cloud computing offers remote access via the Internet, and that this access is on demand. There is no need to tap into a company intranet, for example. AWS is presumably responsible for software updates and there is a presumption that there might be scale benefits to this cloud storage as well, over what it would cost Ericsson to do this itself. No figures are presented in the case to support any of this, but we are supposed to assume it.

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Amazon provides information on its website with respect to its products. EC2 is what it calls an "elastic compute cloud." Amazon describes this service as providing "resizable compute capacity," which appalling assaults on the grammatical structure of the English language aside reflects the ability for web developers to scale up and configure capacity easily. So EC2 is specifically designed to help programmers with scalability. EC2 also only charges the customer for the capacity that they use, which should combine capacity flexibility with cost flexibility.

Amazon S3, or Simple Storage Service, is a basic cloud storage service, a web-based interface that allows for storage and remote retrieval online. Again the key is that Amazon charges its customers for what they use, which allows customers to scale up or down quickly and easily. Amazon combines S3 with a number of back office services that include data analysis, making the gathering, storage and analysis of large amounts of data simple, and available online anytime. Rightscale is a cloud computing platform that Amazon runs, again allowing for full scalability.

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There are a number of security concerns with cloud computing. Jamil and Zaki (2011) provide an excellent overview of the many different security issues with cloud computing -- loss of governance, lock-in, data protection, insecure data deletion -- and solutions to address them. Carlin and Curran (2011) also note that while most cloud solutions have sophisticated encryption, providers are responsible for security. Theoretically, a company like AWS should be able to provide better security at a lower price than its clients could on their own, one of the advantages of economies of scale.

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