Forrester outlines 11 cloud computing technologies

Forrester recommends a 'right-sourcing' approach to cloud computing

Analyst firm Forrester has released its TechRadar report on cloud computing, outlining 11 technologies that IT departments need to think about deploying.

The report argues that its new taxonomy will help IT management make sense of the different cloud offerings, and move to the cloud in a structured fashion.

"While most cloud services are immature today, and thus really only best applied to new applications and services, as they mature their applicability to existing applications and equipment will increase," said Forrester analyst and report author James Staten.

"Forrester recommends that organisations begin a strategic 'right-sourcing' approach to optimising their IT shops, looking for elements of their portfolio that can be replaced, over time, by cloud services."

The company's traditional definition of cloud computing is a "standardised IT capability (services, software or infrastructure) delivered via internet technologies in a pay-per-use, self-service way".

Characteristics of the model include flexibility, in that most services are priced based on consumption and, in most cases, if an organisation stops consuming them, the bills stop too.

Cloud computing also offers a time-to-market advantage because the services can be provisioned with little human interaction, such as sales calls or lengthy procurement processes, and provides cost benefits because multiple customers can be serviced from the same resources.

However, while Forrester noted that there are commonalities that unite cloud computing vendors, the firm highlighted some major differences between cloud services.

The report pointed out that most organisations divide cloud services into three categories, commonly referred to as the 'SPI model' of software-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service and infrastructure-as-a-service.

Software-as-a-service offers finished applications that can only be modified with lightweight customisations, platform-as-a-service provides frameworks for application developers to create new online services, and infrastructure-as-a-service allows sophisticated developers to procure virtual machines in minutes.