The Cloud Song

Cloud computing has become

The biggest rage in technology, of late

Let us jointly explore

What is real or virtual, and how much of IT is fake?

We will start by dissecting

What cloud is all about

Its makeup and characteristics

And, why it has such clout?

Each letter of CLOUD holds a clue and,

Tells us about its might

The rest, I will let you figure out

Why this new way of computing is so tight?

C of the cloud

Stands for computing that is commoditized

Each technology stack of the OSI model

Is integrated and highly virtualized

The hardware, the software, in the cloud

The O/S and even the network

Requires little new capital

And, yet adds to your net-worth

L is for leverage

The cloud provides to all

Internal, private, or public cloud

One can access them, without even a call

O is for the new way of outsourcing

The cloud has ushered in

Those who hop on the hype cycle

Will flourish and help their customers win

No longer will it be the sourcing of data center

Or your place or mine

The focus will be business transaction

That can be computed for less than a dime

U is for ubiquity

The cloud can finally offer

Anytime, anyplace computing

Without latency or waiting to buffer

D stands for dynamic provisioning

The most important feature of this new information age

From a standard browser one can access

Unbound computing, ubiquitous connectivity, and infinite storage

Death is what cloud will bring

To un-virtualized and proprietary compute environment

There will be a few applications that may still need them

But they will be far and few, outdated and mostly dormant

Finally, there is a letter

That must be added to the cloud

Without which it is all but vapor

And nothing to shout about

It is S for security

So critical for the cloud ushered cyberspace

As your data seamlessly bounces between private and public cloud

And moves around the globe, as if in a race

S is also for service

The clouds collectively enable

From infrastructure, to platform, to Software-as-a-Service

Open, affordable and capable!

Raj Asava

The author is vice president, Dell Services

maildqindia@cybermedia.co.in