Forrester outlines 11 cloud computing technologies
New taxonomy will help firms move to the cloud in an organised way, says analyst
Analyst firm Forrester has released its TechRadar report on cloud computing, outlining 11 technologies that IT departments need to think about deploying.
The report argues that its new taxonomy will help IT management make sense of the different cloud offerings, and move to the cloud in a structured fashion.
"While most cloud services are immature today, and thus really only best applied to new applications and services, as they mature their applicability to existing applications and equipment will increase," said Forrester analyst and report author James Staten.
"Forrester recommends that organisations begin a strategic 'right-sourcing' approach to optimising their IT shops, looking for elements of their portfolio that can be replaced, over time, by cloud services."
The company's traditional definition of cloud computing is a "standardised IT capability (services, software or infrastructure) delivered via internet technologies in a pay-per-use, self-service way".
Characteristics of the model include flexibility, in that most services are priced based on consumption and, in most cases, if an organisation stops consuming them, the bills stop too.
Cloud computing also offers a time-to-market advantage because the services can be provisioned with little human interaction, such as sales calls or lengthy procurement processes, and provides cost benefits because multiple customers can be serviced from the same resources.
However, while Forrester noted that there are commonalities that unite cloud computing vendors, the firm highlighted some major differences between cloud services.
The report pointed out that most organisations divide cloud services into three categories, commonly referred to as the 'SPI model' of software-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service and infrastructure-as-a-service.
Software-as-a-service offers finished applications that can only be modified with lightweight customisations, platform-as-a-service provides frameworks for application developers to create new online services, and infrastructure-as-a-service allows sophisticated developers to procure virtual machines in minutes.
But Forrester believes that these categories are too general, and offers what it considers to be a more complete view of cloud computing.
"While this categorisation is relatively easy to understand, it does not tell the whole story," said Staten. "There are some services within application middleware and infrastructure segments that are not full platforms but discrete services that can be consumed standalone."
It is for this reason that Staten identifies 11 service categories that fall into the three classes of cloud services.
"While definition is crucial to having a fruitful discussion of the cloud, the proper taxonomy and maturity of these options is more important when planning your investment strategy," he said.
Forrester's research considered four factors when evaluating the technologies: current maturity of the category of technology; potential impact on customers' businesses; the time that experts think the technology will need to reach the next stage of maturity; and overall trajectory from minimal to significant success.
Business process management-as-a-service was the first technology evaluated. This is a solution that provides basic process modelling via the cloud with few management capabilities as of yet, said Staten. Examples of vendors in the space include Appian, Cordys and Lombardi.
The second technology is cloud billing, which is used to add payment processing to a web site. Vendor examples include Amazon, Aria Systems, Google, Highdeal, Softrax and Zuora.
Cloud labs is the third technology listed by Staten, which is used for the functional testing of web or virtual machine-based applications, as well as for scalability and performance testing. Citrix, CollabNet, Interactive TKO and Skytap are firms in this area, he said.
Meanwhile, the rest of the technologies Staten listed are more common to those familiar with the cloud computing market: database-as-a-service, desktop- as-a-service, infrastructure-as-a-service, integration-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service, software-as-a-service and storage-as-a-service.
