BANGALORE, INDIA: Cloud computing and virtualization are the oft repeated buzz words in the wide spectrum of the IT community.

Enterprises today are driven to adopt new ways to reduce costs, increase business agility and improve data centre efficiency. I keep meeting customers, industry peers who are ecstatic about cloud computing but yet sceptical of how it will pan-out for them (organisation).

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And I try to elucidate in a very simple manner - using an analogy of a “Service Apartment”.

Yes, that’s right – a service apartment.

We all live in a house which belongs to us - own or rented. But whichever the option, we are responsible for its maintenance and enhancement. Treat “Cloud” as a service apartment, which is managed and run by an organization and it makes it available to users as and when required.

This organization is akin to “Cloud Provider”. Let's extend this analogy further, the “Service Provider” will need to provide various services as part of the offering and these could be – options of apartment size, security, housekeeping, maintenance, flexibility to hire additional room for few days, capability to bill, broadband, TV  etc.

In addition, the service provider may also provide option to user to choose the type of broadband (WiFi, wired, speed), TV (Flat screen, how many, what size) , TV transmission (cable or DTH) music system (which brand and fidelity).

Various options thus made available by a service provider can be equated to “Cloud Service Offerings”.

In order to provide customers the flexibility and comfort, the service provider will need to work with a whole lot of partners (security and housekeeping agencies, service providers, white goods providers etc.) to make this work.

These in cloud world can be likened to “Ecosystem” of partners which a “Service Provider” will need. In this analogy, the assumption is that the service apartment is available to be rented by anyone.

This can be called as “Public Cloud”. It has been very common in India for Government to provide accommodation to its employees or industrial houses to run townships for employees. It is analogous to “Private Cloud”.

Innovations such as virtualisation and cloud computing allow greater sharing of IT resources and enable them to be deployed as a service. The IT industry has worked towards a vision of delivering IT-as-a-Service for years and we are already seeing an explosion of web-based-services.