Enterprise vs. Cloud Computing

I recently found myself in a discussion where I was trying to differentiate between web computing and cloud computing. I was trying to make a point that these days all web-based products are claiming to be cloud-enabled. Anyhow, I later realized that I was making a wrong comparison. The web is in fact just a medium for product delivery; the comparison should have ideally been between "Enterprise Computing" and "Cloud Computing". In an era where "Cloud" has become the buzz word, most people are touting their web-enabled enterprise products to be cloud-enabled.

Enterprise and Cloud computing are two different things, the only thing common is perhaps that both are  web-enabled, which means that they can be accessed via the browser using an internet connection. However, there are many differences in these two technologies, and some of them are highlighted below.

1. Single-tenant vs. Multi-tenant: Enterprise solutions are generally single-tenant, which means that each customer or enterprise has its own deployment. Cloud solutions are multi-tenant, where the same deployment supports multiple domains (customers or enterprises).

2. Scalability: Enterprise products are expected to scale from 10s to perhaps 1000s of users, whereas Cloud solutions need to scale to millions of users. So whereas an Enterprise platform may be scaled vertically by beefing up the server hardware, Cloud platforms generally rely on horizontal scalability by increasing the number of processing nodes in the cluster.

3. Performance: In an Enterprise platform, performance may be improved by having  multiple processing threads; however, cloud platforms improve performance by processing on multiple nodes in parallel. Therefore, Cloud platforms require a distributed processing and coordination framework, such as Hadoop.

4. Virtualization: Enterprise products generally use dedicated resources - servers, storage devices etc. Cloud-enabled products, on the other hand, use virtualization to share hardware resources.

5. Access Control: In an Enterprise platform, access controls pertains only to user access control, whereas in Cloud platforms, access control also applies to the resources shared between the multiple tenants.

I am sure that there are other differences between Enterprise and Cloud computing, so this is certainly not a comprehensive list. The objective is primarily to get the product architects thinking in the right direction. I hope you found it useful.