TCS and Cloud Computing

Transcription

1 TCS and Cloud Computing Is Cloud Computing the Next Big Thing? This paper on Cloud Computing explains why it may well be so. It traces the context of Cloud Computing, a paradigm shift in IT. Exploring industry definitions of this phenomenon, this paper offers TCS perspectives on various aspects of Cloud Computing: Types of Cloud delivery models, Public Cloud Computing for Enterprise business and its challenges, Public-Private & Federated Clouds, Next Generation Computing Services and Benefits of the Cloud. It articulates TCS Taxonomy on Cloud Computing. TCS believes that Cloud Computing will prove very attractive to the Enterprise IT world and specifically to IT service providers, primarily due the infinite opportunities around innovative business models. While the technology foundations of Cloud Computing can be considered as a gradual evolution, TCS firmly believes that the business models will prove to be potentially disruptive. Cloud could be a disruptive change for some enterprises, or it could be an evolution beyond virtualization and utility computing for others. Many challenges remain in leveraging Cloud Computing but it will become an increasingly viable option for enterprise IT. This is the first in a series of TCS White Papers on Cloud Computing.

2 About the Authors K Ananth Krishnan Chief Technology Officer, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS). As CTO, Ananth directs technology and research in TCS. Ananth chairs the Corporate Technology Board, the governing body of Innovation in TCS. He has moved the company to an open and collaborative innovation model, forging the TCS Co Innovation Network, that connects to a gamut of entities in the ecosystem such as global academic and research institutions, strategic technology partners, venture funds and start ups to deliver disruptive, sustaining and platform innovation solutions to customers. He focuses the research efforts of TCS Innovation Labs world wide, that create new solutions in various domains, into offerings that are of measurable value to customers. A member of TCS Corporate Think-Tank since 1999, he has led several strategic initiatives and influenced business decisions. He has been at the helm of large transformational projects within the company. He is on the Customer Advisory Boards of several organizations including Symantec and IBM-Rational, He is a Senior Member of the IEEE and a member of the Computer Society of India, and is an invited faculty in the Department of Management Studies at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. Ananth has been named in Computerworld s Premier 100 IT Leaders for He has been chosen as one of Infoworld s Top 25 CTOs for Ananth is an M. Tech. in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. He also has a Masters degree in Physics from the same Institute and a Bachelor's degree in Physics from Fergusson College, Pune. 1

3 About the Authors (contd.) Prof Harrick Vin Vice President, Head, Systems Research, TCS Innovation Labs - TRDDC Member, TCS Corporate Technology Board Prof. Harrick s research interests are in the areas of networks, operating systems, distributed systems, and multimedia systems. He has co-authored more than 100 papers in leading journals and conferences. Harrick is a recipient of several awards including the Faculty Fellow in Computer Sciences, Dean's Fellowship, National Science Foundation CAREER award, IBM Faculty Development Award, Fellow of the IBM Austin Center for Advanced Studies, AT&T Foundation Award, National Science Foundation Research Initiation Award, IBM Doctoral Fellowship, NCR Innovation Award, and San Diego Supercomputer Center Creative Computing Award. He has served on the Editorial Board of ACM/Springer Multimedia Systems Journal, IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, and IEEE Multimedia. He has been a guest editor for IEEE Network. He has served as the program chair, the program co-chair, and a program committee member for several conferences. Prior to joining TCS in 2005, Harrick was a Professor of Computer Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin. Harrick received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California at San Diego. V. Srinivasa Raghavan Senior Consultant and Lead -Cloud Computing Initiative, TCS Raghavan is with the TCS Corporate Technology Office and is the global business owner for the TCS Cloud Computing initiative. A versatile technology professional with over 15 years of experience, he has built technology solutions for customers in various industries and geographies. In his earlier role he was an enterprise architect in the TCS Emerging Markets Business Unit, heading the architecture practice, and prior to that he was a senior solution architect for the reuse program in TCS. Raghavan holds a Bachelor s degree in Computer Science and Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi and a Master s degree in Aerospace Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. 2

4 Table of Contents 1. Introduction - A New Paradigm 4 2. Industry Definitions of Cloud Computing 6 Forrester 6 Gartner 6 Wikipedia 6 University of California, Berkeley 6 3. Cloud Computing TCS perspectives 7 Benefits of Cloud Computing 7 Types of Cloud Delivery Models 7 Public Cloud Computing for Enterprise Business 9 From Public to Private and Federated Clouds 10 Next Generation Computing Services 11 Our Vision for Next Generation Computing Services TCS Cloud Taxonomy Summary References 15 3

5 Introduction - A New Paradigm (by K. Ananth Krishnan, Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, TATA Consultancy Services) The first six decades of Information Technology (IT) have witnessed startling evolution across several dimensions like: Infrastructure paradigms like centralized computing, personal computing, client-server computing, the Internet and mobile computing. Technology abstractions like operating systems, database and transaction processing, application components and service oriented architectures. Application domains like personal productivity and collaboration, industry-specific platforms and enterprise applications. Service models like infrastructure services, application management services, systems integration and consulting services. So what is the next big thing in IT? Cloud Computing is a good candidate, and could impact all of these dimensions. The early adopters of Cloud Computing already exist in the C or consumer world. As individual consumers in the Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 world, we are accustomed to the illusion of infinitely scalable, always available and very simply consumable services typically delivered over the Internet, and now increasingly over the mobile phone and other ubiquitous channels. The E or Enterprise world is now kicking the tires of the same car, and debating whether this is an evolution or a revolution, or is it even a potential disruptor. Hype, fear, uncertainty and doubt are rife. The soothsayers predict billions of dollars to be made or lost in the next few years. Economics seems to be driving more attention to the world of Enterprise Clouds faster than expected. The C world cost benchmarks are growing attractive to E world managements. Cloud Computing could be a disruptive change for some enterprises, or it could be just an evolution beyond virtualization and utility computing for others. What matters is that Businesses will continue to demand agility, will store and process massive amounts of data and will need easily available, highly stable and secure platforms. All this needs to be done efficiently and at the lowest cost. Lessons can be drawn from the experience of other Utilities such as Electricity, Telephone, Oil and Gas, and Water. They have all mastered the techniques of centralized production and distributed consumption and most, if not all, have experimented with multiple models before they reached this state. We must understand that though technology is important, success is determined more by the business models used. The Utility Industry is in a continuous state of Dissatisfaction with the Status Quo as far as business models are concerned. 4

6 Cloud Computing could impact the software and services business models in a manner similar to the impact that foundries have had on the hardware industry. The initial model of end-to-end integrated electronic chip players (for example, designers owned the entire value chain, including capital intensive semiconductor fabrication facilities) has evolved into different business models. For example, today, only a few major designers, with very high chip volumes (for example, Intel and Samsung) can justify owning and operating their own fabrication lines. This has motivated the rise of semiconductor foundries that build chips for others, such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC). Foundries enable fab-less semiconductor chip companies whose value is in innovative chip design. A company such as nvidia can now be successful in the chip business without the capital, the operational expenses, and the risks associated with owning a state-of-the-art fabrication line. Conversely, companies with fabrication lines can time-multiplex their use among the products of many fab-less companies to lower the risk of not having enough successful products to amortise operational costs. Does this hint at the shades of Public Clouds and Private Clouds? More later! TCS believes that Cloud Computing will be very attractive to the Enterprise IT world and specifically to IT service providers, primarily due the infinite opportunities around such business models. While the technology foundations of Cloud Computing can be considered as a gradual evolution, TCS firmly believes that the business models will prove to be potentially disruptive. The TCS taxonomy for Cloud Computing is based on four abstraction layers starting with the Infrastructure, the Platforms, the Software and finally the Cloud-specific Services. TCS believes that delivering a credible set of Cloud Computing Offerings to enterprises will require collaborative innovation across multiple players such as public Cloud providers, software and service providers, product vendors, and application vendors. TCS believes that it is uniquely positioned to play a major role in Cloud Computing with its Co-innovation Network TM (TCS COIN ), built on a strong internal foundation of TCS Innovation Labs, anchor clients and strong strategic alliances with a range of innovative companies and academia. The TCS Cloud Computing initiative has built a credible set of offerings across advisory, implementation and support functions. In this white paper, we will set the context for Cloud Computing and present TCS definitions and insights into this area. This will be the first in a series of white papers to be published. A subsequent paper will define TCS strategies for Cloud Computing. Later papers will cover the TCS offerings around Cloud Computing, and lessons and best practices for Cloud Computing specific to industry verticals. 5

7 Industry Definitions of Cloud Computing Before we present TCS s definition and insights into Cloud Computing, let us understand the various definitions of Cloud Computing in the industry. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (for example, networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction. This cloud model promotes availability and is composed of five essential characteristics, three service models, and four deployment [1] models. Wikipedia Cloud Computing is a style of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet. Users need not have knowledge of, expertise in, or control over the technology [2] infrastructure in the "Cloud" that supports them. University of California, Berkeley Cloud Computing refers to both the applications delivered as services over the Internet and the hardware and systems software in the data centers that provide those services. The services themselves have long been referred to as Software as a Service (SaaS), so we use that term. The data center hardware and software is what we will call a [3] Cloud. 6

8 Cloud Computing TCS perspectives A Cloud is a set of IT infrastructure optimisation techniques rolled into one and offered as a shared service to its customers. A Cloud Computing model is generally characterised by: A true on-demand computing paradigm Decoupling of application design and development from deployment Automated system deployment and scaling A pay-per-use pricing model Flexible access models Leveraging public Cloud Computing platforms could enable an organization to consider a spectrum of options for running its IT: from not owning a data centre at all to leveraging only private cloud technologies inside the enterprise. Benefits of Cloud Computing Cloud Computing services offer three key benefits: Cloud services offer an illusion of the availability of infinite compute resources on-demand, and thereby eliminate the need for Cloud users to plan ahead for provisioning. Cloud services eliminate any up-front commitment by Cloud users, thereby allowing companies to start small and increase hardware resources only when there is an increase in their needs. Thus, companies can deploy a service and scale on demand without taking the risk to build or provision a data centre for an unknown future service demand. This not only eliminates the upfront capital investment for Cloud users, but also transfers the risk of over-provisioning (under utilisation) and under-provisioning (saturation) to Cloud providers. The ability to pay for use of computing resources on a short-term basis as needed (for example, processors by the hour and storage by the day) and release them when they are no longer useful leads to significant economic benefits. All these benefits enable enterprises to focus on their core competence rather than running large data centres. Types of Cloud Delivery Models Today s public Cloud Computing delivery models can be distinguished based on the level of abstractions they export to the Cloud users (or programmers) and the level of computing resource management (flexibility) they offer. Based on this characterization, today s Cloud delivery models can be broadly classified into three categories: Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): These Cloud service providers offer computational resources such as servers, network, and storage from a shared facility managed by the provider to Cloud users on an on-demand basis. Examples of IaaS providers include Amazon Web Services and Flexiscale. IaaS providers allow users to dynamically grow and shrink their resource allocations to match their demands. However, the responsibility of utilising this elasticity effectively rests with the Cloud user. 7

9 Platform as a Service (PaaS): The Cloud service providers export application development platforms that broadly fall into two categories: - Those that export application development platforms for certain domains or class of applications (for example, the Google AppEngine and Force.com) - Those that export general purpose application development platform (for example, Microsoft s Azure). In either case, applications developed using these platforms benefit from elasticity offered by infrastructure-as-aservice Cloud providers. For instance, the Google AppEngine is directed at traditional Web applications; applications developed using the AppEngine API can scale automatically with increase in the number of resources, as well as achieve high availability through replication. Force.com exports a platform for developing business applications that solely interact with the salesforce.com database, while Microsoft's Azure platform allows developing applications using.net libraries and compiled to a common runtime language environment. The.NET libraries provide a degree of scalability and fail-over support, but require developers to declaratively specify application characteristics to take advantage of these features. Users do not get control of the operating system or runtime but are allowed to choose programming languages. Software as a service (SaaS): The Software as a Service Cloud service providers offer specific application services delivered over the Internet on some form of on-demand payment system. Examples include Salesforce.com and WebEx. Figure 1 shows the different Cloud Computing delivery models. User Level "Software-as-a-Service" Companies host applications in the cloud that many users access through internet connections. The service being sold or offered is a complete end-user application Google Docs, acrobat.com, Zoho,salesforce.com, Animoto, Oracle on demand, Windows Office Live Developer Level "Platform-as-a-Service" Developers can design, build and test applications that run on the Cloud provider's infrastructure and then deliver those applications to end-users from the providers servers Azure Services Platform, Oracle SaaS platform, Coghead, force.com, Yahoo developer network, Google App Engine IT Level "Infrastructure-asa-Service" Obtain general processing, storage, database management, and other resources and applications through the network and pay only for what gets used Amazon Web Services, Gogrid, Sun Grid Compute Utility, Google Base Figure 1 - Cloud Delivery Models 8

10 Public Cloud Computing for Enterprise Business While public Clouds are quite attractive from the cost perspective, there are several fundamental limitations of public Clouds that prevent their wide-spread acceptance for enterprise applications. Economics: The decision process in most enterprises for Cloud Computing will start with the economics will the Cloud bring down the total costs? Cloud need not always be a cheaper option. Enterprises need to consider various factors while calculating the total costs, such as depreciation and tax benefits, processor capacity, storage, network bandwidth, software licenses, power, and floor space. Economics will also depend on the size of the enterprise (Small and Medium versus Large), and the workload and other characteristics of the applications. It is likely that for sporadic usage scenarios such as testing and short-term computationally intensive tasks, the Cloud could be a winner, while for others a deeper understanding of the economics is required. Data confidentiality and auditability: Security and auditability are significant concerns for most enterprises given the public nature of Cloud offerings. There are regulatory requirements such as HIPAA or Sarbanes-Oxley that will necessitate auditability of corporate data in the Cloud. In addition, national laws may mandate Cloud providers to keep data within national boundaries or prevent a second country from getting access to this data through its legal system. There is also a significant risk to privacy of personal information and confidentiality of information from businesses or government organisations when data is located in the Cloud. Software licensing: The current licensing model for commercial software is a mismatch for Cloud Computing. Current software licensing limits the computer on which it can be installed and users pay one time and annual maintenance charges. Thus, many Cloud providers have relied upon open source software but a key challenge for commercial software vendors is to devise a better licensing model for the Cloud. Service availability: Enterprises are very sensitive to whether Cloud providers can guarantee adequate availability required by business (especially since enterprises will have little or no control over the physical Cloud environment). Further, relying exclusively on a single Cloud service provider can also be a single point of failure; most enterprises are reluctant to move to a Cloud provider without some business continuity strategy in place. To guarantee high availability and avoid a single source of failure, multiple Cloud providers with independent software stacks could be used. This, however, increases implementation complexity significantly. Service lock-in (proprietary APIs? no interoperability): Cloud providers today lack interoperability standards. This implies that a Cloud user cannot easily move applications and data between any two Cloud vendors, which results in a lock-in scenario. The lock-in is definitely advantageous to Cloud providers but Cloud users are vulnerable to increase in prices, reliability problems or, in the worst case, the Cloud provider becoming defunct. Standardisation of APIs will not only mitigate lock-in but will also enable the same software infrastructure to be used in private and public Cloud such that excess computation workload that cannot be handled in the private Cloud could be off-loaded to the public Cloud ( surge protection ). Data transfer bottleneck and cost (technology trends): Given the data-intensive nature of applications, data transfer - into and out of a Cloud - becomes a major issue with the current price of $100 to $150 USD per terabyte transferred. This cost can quickly become prohibitive thus making data transfer a major bottleneck to Cloud adoption. This is a significant challenge as, over the past decade, the cost of wide area network bandwidth has fallen at a much slower rate than the cost of computation and storage capacity. 9

11 Performance unpredictability: Multiple Virtual Machines (VMs) can share CPU and main memory quite well but I/O sharing often leads to interference and hence unpredictability in performance. Difficulty in debugging large-scale distributed systems: When an application is migrated to the Cloud and executed in a large-scale distributed environment, there may be bugs that manifest, which may not be apparent in a small-scale configuration. Detecting and debugging faults in such large-scale distributed deployment is quite a challenge. Due to many of these reasons, today most of the public Cloud platforms are used primarily by small start-ups (with little or no legacy applications or environments) or by enterprises for not-so-business-critical applications and environments (for example, development and test environments). Most public Cloud providers realize these limitations and have started working on solutions to address many of these issues. Hence, over the next few years, we expect that public Cloud platforms will become more viable to host business critical applications and services. From Public to Private and Federated Clouds Enterprises can address the limitations of a public Cloud by creating and operating a private Cloud that is shared across business units, hosting applications within the enterprise, but not for anyone outside the enterprise. This approach has the following advantages and disadvantages. Advantages: The enterprise has greater control over the infrastructure. Thus, all of the challenges related to areas such as data security, platform heterogeneity become slightly more manageable. Private Clouds are also better at handling legacy application platforms and constraints (as most public Clouds today only support x86 server platforms). Disadvantages: Designing and operating a private Cloud and achieving a Total Cost Ownership (TCO) close to what public Cloud providers can offer is a significant technical challenge. Consequently, no single Cloud provider (or Cloud implementation) meets (or is likely to meet) all enterprise requirements. In such a scenario, organizations can create and manage Federated Virtual Private Clouds. A federated Cloud design can leverage multiple Cloud implementations including a private Cloud implementation and match application and business requirements to Cloud implementation features and capabilities. Figure 2 provides a conceptual view of a Federated Virtual Private Cloud. 10

12 Applications Federation of enterprise and cloud services Secure, governed "virtual private cloud" Enterprise Infrastructure Cloud Provider #1 Cloud Provider #2 Figure 2 - Federated Virtual Private Cloud Next Generation Computing Services Cloud Computing forms a key enabler of TCS s vision for Next Generation Computing Services. Our Vision for Next Generation Computing Services Next generation enterprise computing services environment should: Support high-level specifications of IT service definitions, their Service Level Objectives (SLO) and business priorities. Support automated provisioning, allocation and optimization of resource allocations based on these specifications to meet these SLO requirements. Achieve low cost. Allocate Workloads/Data Policies: IT service definitions Service agreements Business priorities Provision Resources Optimise Services: Meet business requirements Identities / Security Figure 3 - Next Generation Computing Services 11

13 To meet these objectives, the design of an enterprise computing environment should be driven by the following principles: Right sizing: The infrastructure provisioned for delivering services should be just as large as required overprovisioning (under utilization) and under-provisioning (saturation) should be avoided. Note that each infrastructure component is a multi-dimensional resource. For instance, a server is a resource with three dimensions: compute capacity, memory size and IO/network bandwidth. Similarly, a storage device is a twodimensional resource (with storage capacity and read/write bandwidth as the two dimensions). The infrastructure should be provisioned and configured with the right amount of resource on each of these dimensions. Over provisioning on any dimension increases the cost. Diversity reduction: Diversity is defined with respect to the hardware and software stacks supported within an infrastructure. When the diversity is greater, the overhead and cost of maintaining the infrastructure is higher. Sharing: The computational demands of most services fluctuate significantly over time. Thus, sharing or multiplexing the resources available within a data centre is a key principle in reducing the overall footprint and the total cost of operating the environment. Elasticity: To enable an enterprise to benefit from using shared computing resources across applications and business units, one must allow resources allocated to an application to grow and shrink with demand. Further, applications should be architected to operate correctly and efficiently in the presence of such fluctuations in resource allocations. Lastly, charging users (or business units) based on the actual usage of resources (pay-asyou-use charging model) is essential to promote elasticity. The charging model should also consider a finer granularity of pay-per-use based on computation, storage and communication utilisation. Agility: An enterprise IT environment should leverage emerging technologies rapidly as well as support rapid deployment of new applications and services to meet business demands. Predictive: To drive most of the above principles and optimisation techniques, an enterprise must rely upon predictive analytics on the data collected from its operational environment. To support such analytics, the IT environment must be well instrumented and monitored to collect data about infrastructure and application inventory, workload, performance, reliability, among others. Whereas these principles are relatively well understood, the design of enterprise computing environments that satisfy the principles poses a significant challenge. Cloud Computing has an important role to play in this. 12

14 TCS Cloud Taxonomy With a lot of information available on this new area, it is imperative to build a taxonomy which forms the basis for common understanding and focus. TCS has extensively studied this area, and the following taxonomy reflects TCS s [7] insights on Cloud Computing. There are other taxonomies available such as the OpenCrowd Cloud Taxonomy. All [6] these views will be the basis for the standardization efforts that have just started across the industry. 4.0 Cloud Services { 4.2 Business Models 4.1 Services Owned vs Shared, Public vs Private, Single-vs Multi-Enteprise, Variable Cost Model, Strategic Platforms, Granular Pricing,... Advisory Services, Migration Services, Development Services, Deployment Services 3.0 Software as a Service { 3.2 Applications 3.1 Domain Components SaaS, Software-and-service, IT-as-a-Service, Platform-and-Service, Horizontal (Payroll, Accounting, Collaboration,---) vs Vertical (Inventory Management, Loyalty Management,...),... Widgets, Mashups, Components, Services, Domain-specific environments 2.0 Platform as a Service { { 2.2 Enablers and Frameworks 2.1 Abstractions Software Engineering (Architecture, Design, Development, Build, Test, Release), Domain-agnostic Platforms, Analytics, Workflow, Scheduler,... Programming, File/DB, Integration and Messaging, Identity and Security, Management, Measurement, Data Consistency, Transactions, Autonomic/Self-healing capability, Clustering, Scalability/Elasticity, Multi-tenancy, Load-balancing, Infrastructure as a Service 1.2 Logical Infrastructure 1.1 Physical Infrastructure Virtualization, Virtual OS, Utility, Compute, Data Grid, Appliances,... Processor, Storage, Memory, Network,... Figure 4 - TCS Cloud Taxonomy The Cloud Taxonomy consists of 4 layers, 8 sub-layers, and a variety of areas to address. Though layers and sub-layers are static, TCS foresees that the areas to address will be a growing list. The growing list is denoted by ellipsis ( ). The IaaS layer contains the following sub-layers: Physical Infrastructure This addresses the elements of physical infrastructure such as processors, storage, memory, network and devices. Logical Infrastructure This is the backbone for Cloud infrastructure. Areas to address include techniques for virtualization such as hypervisors, virtual operating systems, and other logical elements such as utility computing and compute- grids 13

15 The PaaS layer contains the following sub-layers, which enable the building of true Cloud applications: Abstractions Building a Cloud application requires a review of almost every computing paradigm to devise tools and techniques for exploiting the Cloud infrastructure. This sub-layer also provides APIs to the higher layers to exploit the infrastructure. Some of the areas to address will include programming techniques, file system, integration patterns, techniques for data consistency, transactions. Enablers and Frameworks These address the domain-independent tools and techniques for building applications in the Cloud. These are reusable components for the higher-level layers. Some of the areas to address will be Software Development Lifecycle tools, domain-agnostic platforms, and common IT applications such as workflows. The SaaS layer contains the following sub-layers and addresses the unique needs of the customers by providing domain-specific software as a service. This contains the following sub-layers: Domain Components These address the domain-specific tools and techniques for building applications on a Cloud. These are reusable business components. Areas to address will include mashups, widgets, business services, domain-specific platforms such as mobile application platforms, and so on. Applications This sub-layer addresses various application offerings, horizontal and domain applications that can be provided in a SaaS mode The Cloud Services layer provides the unique services needed to truly disrupt business models, and bring out the true value of Cloud Computing to enterprises. Services This sub-layer looks at the various service offerings provided by the IT vendors, including advisory (consulting), migration, application development, and deployment. Business Models This sub-layer is unique to the Cloud. Areas to address will encompass business concerns of consumers and providers, including the type of Cloud (private or public or hybrid or federated), innovative pricing models, costing models, and innovative strategic platforms. This area offers flexibility and provides infinite possibilities in disrupting the business of IT. 14

16 Summary It is clear that Cloud Computing is fast moving beyond the hype to being taken very seriously in organizations. Cloud Computing gets us close to the dream of an efficient, centralized computing power, and there are many niche players positioning their products. In the current scenario, while the definitions, taxonomy, and benefits of Cloud Computing are well understood, there are still many open questions that need to be addressed before one can engage with the CXOs of customer organizations, and move from a proof-of-concept to a serious production quality application. The early movers who have addressed these open issues with their unique insights will be the most successful in the long term. TCS believes that Cloud could be a disruptive change for some enterprises, or it could be an evolution beyond virtualization and utility computing for others. Many challenges remain but TCS believes that Cloud Computing will become an increasingly viable option for enterprise IT. TCS has launched a COIN-based Cloud initiative to address these issues and has built a credible set of offerings across advisory, implementation and support. In the next paper, TCS will share its strategy on Cloud Computing. References 1. Draft NIST Working Definition of Cloud Computing v15, cloud-computing/cloud-def-v15.doc 2. Wikipedia, [Accessed July 20, 2009] 3. Above the Clouds: A Berkeley View of Cloud Computing, Technical Report No. UCB/EECS , Feb 10, Security Guidance for Critical Areas of Focus in Cloud Computing, Cloud Security Alliance, April Nicholas Carr, The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google, W.W. Norton & Co., 2008, ISBN Open Cloud Consortium, 7. OpenCrowd Cloud Taxonomy, 15

17 About Innovation Labs TCS has to its credit several disruptive innovations to its credit. It set up its first research lab in 1981 when the IT industry in India was just taking shape. It set-up a software tool foundry which has over the years produced generations of tools for model driven development, testing, artificial intelligence and re-engineering, to name a few. Today, the global network of TCS Innovation Labs work across domains and new technologies to deliver a range of solution frameworks. In the true spirit of collaboration, TCS has created a Co- Innovation Network (TCS COIN ). This connects to several entities in the innovation ecosystem and TCS co-innovates with them, capitalizing on the strengths of each to the benefit of all. Leveraging its tool strength, business innovation experience and its co-innovation capabilities, TCS is well equipped to play a major role in Cloud Computing. Cloud Computing is a set of IT infrastructure optimisation techniques rolled into one and offered as a shared service to customers. A Cloud Computing model is generally characterized by a true on-demand computing paradigm, automated system deployment and scaling, and a granular pay-per-use pricing model, among others. Still evolving, this model poses several questions but also offers flexibility and saving to enterprise customers. Subscribe to TCS White Papers TCS.com RSS: Feedburner: About Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) Tata Consultancy Services is an IT services, business solutions and outsourcing organization that delivers real results to global businesses, ensuring a level of certainty no other firm can match. TCS offers a consulting-led, integrated portfolio of IT and IT-enabled services delivered through its unique Global Network Delivery TM Model, recognized as the benchmark of excellence in software development. A part of the Tata Group, India s largest industrial conglomerate, TCS has over 143,000 of the world's best trained IT consultants in 42 countries. The company generated consolidated revenues of US $6 billion for fiscal year ended 31 March 2009 and is listed on the National Stock Exchange and Bombay Stock Exchange in India. For more information, visit us at To find out more about the Cloud Computing initiative within TCS, contact [email protected] All content / information present here is the exclusive property of Tata Consultancy Services Limited (TCS). The content / information contained here is correct at the time of publishing. No material from here may be copied, modified, reproduced, republished, uploaded, transmitted, posted or distributed in any form without prior written permission from TCS. Unauthorized use of the content / information appearing here may violate copyright, trademark and other applicable laws, and could result in criminal or civil penalties. Copyright 2009 Tata Consultancy Services Limited TCS Design Services M