Lowering operating costs has always been among the top priorities of today’s enterprises, and cloud computing may be what they need to achieve that.
This technology has been around for years, but its role today has increased tremendously since it is used not just to provide software as a service, but infrastructure and platform as a service as well.
“This has enabled enterprises to cut costs tremendously on application delivery. It allows enterprise applications, whether they are in the data center or outside, to be delivered to users wherever they are,” said Citrix Systems’ director, strategy and communications, CTO office and Citrix labs, Dr Michael Harris.
This means users can take their notebook computers anywhere and still access their enterprise applications hosted on the cloud.
“Enterprises can perform cost reduction, compared to if the applications were installed on individual machines. This makes the enterprise more agile — the enterprise architecture can now flex according to new demands,” Harris said.
Studies have shown that the use of cloud can cut about 29 percent in IT operational costs, 40 per cent in hardware and software costs, and 88 per cent in worker downtime.
Prospects
Harris sees cloud computing and virtual machines to be part of standard best practices for all data centers in the next few years.
“Cloud enables better use of data center resources through dynamic use of resources. It also reduces the amount of power used, air-conditioning and the speed to replace servers,” he said.
Research firm IDC expects spending on IT cloud services to grow almost three-fold over the next five years, reaching $42 billion by 2012.
Citrix C3
To help enterprises adopt cloud computing, Citrix has come up with the C3 product family.
This includes the XenApp and XenDesktop applications which let companies implement infrastructure and software as a service.
Then there is NetScaler VPX, an appliance for load balancing across…