All your apps are in the cloud(s) now.  It’s OK.  Photo: Paul VanDerWerf, Potts Harbour, Hartswell, ME.  CC license. 

Hyperscale computing (HC) may sound like something only NASA and Google need.  But any business doing any kind of commerce with web sites can potentially benefit, as can brick and mortar companies who are highly dependent on 24 x 7 x 365 operations and no longer want to buy and maintain servers.

Hyperscale computing is computer processing power and storage that can be scaled up or down instantly, in large amounts.  Hyperscale computing relies on distributing computer tasks to multiple servers (distributed computing). You could do this on your own, duplicating your server environment and buying extra servers and the software needed to distribute tasks, but all of this is already available in the cloud, by many reputable firms, at costs that are not only low but predicted to go lower.

Why should you care?  Here are two scenarios where you might benefit:

1. Your product is sold at brick and mortar stores as well as your own web site.  Your retail customers (stores) use your primary site to place orders and as a selling tool in their stores.  You frequently promote your products to generate sales, so traffic and transactions on your site fluctuate a lot.  In this case you have to manage high traffic in a high- responsive way, and you need alternatives for backup if your primary servers fail.  Again, you can manage the hardware physically, but the most efficient way will be to virtualize your servers with scaleability built in, which is the whole purpose of hyperscale computing.
2. You don’t sell a thing online but your 24 x 7 x 365 operation is highly dependent on e-commerce with other companies and your own ERP system, the hardware for which is hosted by you or by an external company. Most companies have redundancy backup internally, or they make sure that apps or services they use are hosted by firms that also have redundancy backup.  But what if your vendor has the traditional one or two server backup, and one or both of those fail?  As companies more and more adopt SaaS for applications solutions, they can’t just assume that their SaaS vendor has adequate backup/scale-up capability.

Think of it this way, in simple terms: what you used to think of as big computers in some refrigerated room running all your stuff is now available online, not only in the quantity that you want, but with much more capacity and speed and at much lower cost; but more importantly agile enough to expand instantly as needed, or failover automatically — both data and software — to a redundant environment in cases of disaster, virus, or overload.

Image by Aucitron, CC license

Cloud computing is being marketed as something new, but it’s not. A cloud is simply a server – a computer you don’t own or maintain – that sits somewhere other than in your building, that you access to run applications or store data. The loan calculators that are ubiquitous on the web run in a cloud that you access via the internet. Data backup services run in the cloud, as do other web tools such as Dropbox and Google Drive.

In fact, cloud computing, technically speaking, can be considered as any software you access that is functioning outside your desktop computer and outside any server that is physically on your company’s premises or within your company’s security firewall.

If you read an ad that says: “Get more out of your data with business intelligence in the cloud,” it could be a vendor selling a SaaS application, database hosting services, or both.

Companies with limited IT resources should always consider a cloud solution. What is new in cloud applications is an expanded range of products and services – today some companies can run nearly their entire business in a cloud environment.

Instead of investing millions in a traditional on-site suite of integrated applications for sales, accounting, logistics and human resources, companies can securely access these solutions as if they were residing on a server inside their building, but without the cost and maintenance of on-premise applications.

Enterprises using cloud applications also do not need to employ a staff of experts to maintain, troubleshoot and periodically upgrade the server(s) or software – all of that is managed by the cloud application provider.

The cloud is made possible by high-speed internet connections and the huge decrease in the cost of computer processing and memory over the past decade. Stronger security methods have also contributed to the growth of the cloud, although some companies are still hesitant to trust a third party with their sensitive corporate data.

Inexpensive cloud applications are available if you can run your business with standard, non-customized applications. Enterprises can access what is called a multi-tenant version of the software – where several companies use the same software, but whose transactions and data are separated from one another by functioning in a different location or “node” of the software. This scenario is also effectively software-as-a-service (SaaS), because you don’t own the software, the vendor does, and you are simply renting it by paying a periodic access fee or a fee based on number of transactions or users.

Another option is for your enterprise to own its own customized software, but outsource the hosting of it on one or more servers and networks. This model has been around for years – many companies outsource the hosting of their applications to data centers. This is why cloud computing, for all its hype, is nothing new.