Cloud Computing

Kou Yukawa
Research Fellow, Economic Research Center

July 21, 2009 (Tuesday)

“Cloud computing” can be considered a recent buzzword in the IT industry, and is used in various different situations. However, it lacks a clear definition.

In general, it can be thought of as “a computing system where users gather various resources externally via the internet and use them as a service.” From a user’s perspective, cloud computing refers to taking hardware, software, and other IT resources that in the past had been managed and held within the company, and placing them externally and using them as a service. This concept is opposite from “on premise,” or systems mainly owned or introduced only within the company and operated internally.

Utility computing and other kinds of future computing systems that were conceived in the past are now becoming possible with the spread of broadband infrastructure and various technological innovations. This in part has focused attention on cloud computing in recent years.

Supporting the evolution of cloud computing, a system for using IT resources, are, for example, grid computing technology which combines computing resources on the internet and provides one integrated computer system as a service; virtualization technology which flexibly divides and integrates resources, regardless of the physical composition, that comprise a computer system; the concept of SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) which constructs large-scale systems as a collection of “services”; and related technology as well as the evolution of business models based on such technological innovation.