Heath Brownsworth

Recently I was presenting on the topic of ‘cloud’ to one of our sales teams.  During this presentation, I fielded a request from an audience member that I had not received before.  In a single word, she wanted me to define cloud. After a moment of consideration, I chose ‘scale’.  Many of the technologies that comprise cloud have been around for a number of years and are in regular use throughout organizations of every size and shape.   However, what seems to be completely unique to cloud is scale. Whether talking about Infrastructure as a Service, (IaaS), Platform as a Service, (PaaS), or Software as a Service, (SaaS), everything concerning the cloud is at a scale that most organizations cannot even begin to fathom.

With scale comes both economies and challenges.  People naturally gravitate to the economies of scale, which certainly helps perpetuate the belief that cloud should automatically be more cost effective than traditional solutions. Keep in mind that this may or may not be true and that it really depends upon the solution in question and any number of variables that are unique to a given situation.  However, the more interesting aspect of scale may actually be the challenges.  Connecting one server to a power source is pretty straight forward, but do you connect 1000 servers the same way that you connect one, or do you re-think the process/requirement altogether?  How do you cool 1000 servers or more likely 10,000 servers?  Do you use complex (costly) HVAC systems or do you consider building the data center on a bluff where the breeze blows constantly and simply open the roof or windows? That suggestion undoubtedly makes security professionals everywhere cringe, but scale introduces challenges that require previously unimagined solutions.

While the debate about the precise definition of cloud is likely to continue for the foreseeable future, scale will be a prominent component of any explanation you are likely to hear.

Heath-