During the current financial crisis and in the difficult times expected ahead, money is going to be tight. Businesses are finding it hard to borrow money for capital expenditures and to meet operating expenses.  Many are looking for a way to significantly reduce ongoing IT capital and operating expenditures, yet maintain a world-class IT infrastructure.

The question is: How to do it?  How can you cut down on IT capital expenditures and ongoing IT operating costs, yet maintain a competitive IT infrastructure?  With traditional IT infrastructure, you can’t.  You’re stuck. You need all the hardware and software, and floor space and cooling and staff and labor-intensive system maintenance.  That’s what traditional distributed computing infrastructure requires.

Wouldn’t it be nice if IT infrastructure were like the infrastructure to deliver water or electricity?  All you do is turn on the service, as much or as little as you want, when you want it. You pay nothing when you’re not using it. The service is reliable, of high quality and inexpensive.

Cloud computing
That is the model for what has come to be called cloud computing: delivering IT infrastructure as simply as water from the tap or electricity from the socket.  Cloud computing makes every element of IT infrastructure available as an on-demand service: operating systems, applications, storage, servers, appliances and workflow management.  You don’t have to make capital expenditures to get it.  You don’t even have to maintain an IT department.  You turn on the tap and it is delivered.  You pay only for what you use.

Cloud computing revolutionises computing in the same way that industrialisation revolutionised goods production: it creates large, extremely efficient service providers that are able to produce IT infrastructure services in high volume at low cost, and renders small operations uncompetitive.  

Benefits
The primary benefit to businesses will be significant cost savings. “An OnDemand business app in the Cloud would cost a customer a third of an OnPremise client-server app over a five-year cycle,” according to Merrill Lynch.¹ You make no capital purchase other than a computer and Internet connection, and only need to pay for the services used.  With no infrastructure to support, you can significantly reduce IT headcount.  You can put the money saved into developing new products and revenue streams, or just not spend the money at all.

There is also no vendor lock in.  You are not saddled with hardware or software that ties you down for years as you amortise the capital expense.  You are not stuck with a bad product or an unresponsive vendor.  You can change vendors when you wish, as often as you wish.

Finally, you can immediately and massively scale up or down for spikes in computing demand, for growth or for decline.  You don’t need to overprovision to prepare for high demand cycles or to engage expensive long-term resources that exceed your short-term needs in anticipation of future growth.

The Citrix Cloud Center
Citrix Systems, Inc., the global leader in application delivery infrastructure, is at the leading edge in cloud computing.  The company offers the Citrix Cloud Center™ (C3) — a complete cloud computing environment that equips cloud providers with the infrastructure needed to deliver cloud services to their customers.

“While the concept of cloud computing may be new,” said Wes Wasson, senior vice president and chief marketing officer of Citrix, “the components that make up C3 are among the most proven in the industry, starting with the Xen hypervisor that powers hundreds of the world’s largest cloud providers today, and extending out to Citrix NetScaler, which delivers Web applications to an estimated 75 percent of all Internet users each day. By integrating these proven technologies with world-class workflow orchestration and datacentre optimisation capabilities, and working with hundreds of partners around the world, Citrix makes the cloud computing era a practical reality for consumers and corporate users alike.”

Cloud computing can be an answer to the dilemma of having to maintain world-class IT infrastructure while needing to significantly reduce IT budgets.  Like all major changes in industry and technology, it is important to adopt the change early, but also to do so wisely.  Investigate which cloud services are available and the strength and viability of the provider of that service.  Survey your legacy technology and see what parts are cloud-ready, then investigate how moving them to the cloud environment can affect your infrastructure and bottom line.  Test the cloud environment by moving one or a few services in your infrastructure to the cloud.  Once you have gained enough insight and comfort with the cloud, the remaining decision is when and how to expose all your infrastructure services as cloud services.

In all of those questions, keep Citrix Cloud Center in mind.  C3 is an integrated portfolio of Citrix delivery infrastructure products packaged specifically for the cloud service provider market.  If the provider uses Citrix Cloud Center, you can be assured that the provider’s service is based on the best technology available for the cloud environment.

¹“The Cloud Wars: $100+ billion at stake,” Merrill Lynch,  p. 5

Learn more

Read Citrix blogs:
Cloud Economics 101: Part I
Cloud Economics 101: Part II