I D C T E C H N O L O G Y
S P O T L I G H T
From Silicon to Cloud: Building Up to Cloud
Sponsored by AMD
Introduction: Cloud Formation for Enterprises
The topic of cloud computing has received tremendous attention in the past year. Cloud computing, in
a nutshell, is the delivery of some aspect of IT (infrastructure, platforms, or applications) as a service
that is accessed via Internet standards and infrastructure. Several factors have driven attention to this
emerging computing model. From a technology point of view the maturation of virtualization software
has enabled highly efficient and dense computing, key to the success of a cloud. Consumers have
driven much of the initial wave of cloud server deployments, as social media and other Web 2.0
usage has skyrocketed. The next wave of cloud is expected to come from the enterprise, as the
pressures of the current economy drive many companies to consider new IT models when they are
forced to continue to do more with less.
To clarify the discussion, IDC will define the following terms used throughout the document:
Cloud computing services – Consumer and business products, services, and solutions delivered and
consumed in real-time over the Internet. Essential characteristics include:
Accessible over the Internet (by people and other services) via Internet standards
IDC categorizes clouds into the following three general types, each offering services at a different
level of the operating stack:
Infrastructure clouds – Provides infrastructure services such as compute and storage. An
example of this type of cloud would be Amazon Web Services EC2 and S3, which offers virtual
machines and storage in the cloud.
Platform clouds – Offers essentially an operating system in the cloud, providing an application
development and runtime environment. Microsoft’s Azure is an example of this type of cloud,
offering the ability to create and run .NET applications.
Application clouds – Hosts an entire application in the cloud, such as Salesforce.com's customer
relationship management (CRM) application.
Platform – Hardware and software technological building blocks arranged according to the needs of a
given usage model, such as virtualized servers.