Cloud Computing has become a hot topic today that interest groups of all levels, from C-suite corporate to individual users. This interest has created two distinct camps: evangelists and conservative technologists. While the former seeks to push immediate adoption of cloud server despite its potential risks, the latter considers the private or public cloud hosting as over-hyped deployment models. 

In my view, the technology brings unparalleled benefits to businesses of all sizes and will dominate the future technology decisions of all the business leaders. A report by Gartner suggests that the public cloud market is forecasted to reach nearly $180 billion by 2015. This implies that the adoption of cloud is quickly rising, with no looking back.  

This brings us to an important question, what is defining the cloud success?

The answer is the traditional mantra as used by the industry experts, "If you cannot quantify, you can certainly not administer it". This is reflected in the ROI (return on investment), which measures the cost savings while making the investment decision. As observed by the technology pundits, the payback period for advancing in cloud technology offsets the cost of capital. This further adds-up with the tangible benefits realized from migrating to this cutting-edge technology that makes it a worth investment. 

Another factor contributing to the success of this solution is the flexibility and agility it brings to the businesses. The financial aspect of the SaaS computing model is quite compelling, which means to pay only for the resources used. This, in particular, is significantly important for growing and mid size businesses. It enables firms to leverage ease of management, convenience & speed with which more users can be added and upgradations are implemented, and the latest versions of software used across the organization. This not only trims-down their IT costs but also brings more agility to their functioning.

Let's take a quick glance at the key building blocks of cloud computing for constructing a robust infrastructure:

Shared Infrastructure: It is critically important for the IT team to identify the configuration of the underlying network and storage in order to effectively share resources across different workloads of the enterprise. In addition, the team needs to identify how to delineate the shared infrastructure between different end users on the infrastructure.

Programmatic Control: This is one of the most important ingredients for building the cloud infrastructure. Service vendors need to have a complete programmatic control over the APIs.

Scalable: The effective cloud solutions are always scalable in the sense that the models provide flexibility to the enterprises to scale-up or down resources from anywhere in line with their business requirements. This provisioning enables organizations to effectively manage workload.

Automated Portal: To ensure that the cloud infrastructure is easily consumed by both IT professionals and developers, the technology is designed to have self service capabilities. This enables users with highly automated portals that allow them to easily add workloads without performing multiple steps of provisioning with the underlying network and storage. 

Multi-Tenancy: Robust multi tenancy entails extensive use of Virtual LANs to seamlessly isolate network traffic across multiple cloud zones. This is an important feature for both internal as well as external clouds to ensure that the authorized users get access to their critical business files and applications. 

Extensive Application Container: It is a more economical and smarter way to migrate to the cloud. This feature ascertains inter dependencies between applications to create correct network subnets, which ensures apt storage and adds efficient running of applications.

To conclude, cloud computing provides cost-effective way to enterprises to quickly deploy various capabilities. It facilitates IT organizations to completely transform the way they function and significantly improve the way clients can access their files and applications.