Computing on demand

On-demand computing is a business computing model that allows companies to provide access to computing resources as they become necessary, rather than full time. Doing this can save the company money on hardware and software licensing among other things.

A common application of on-demand computing might be found in a hospital environment or in very large organizations. The computers that are used within an on-demand computing environment are typically reliant on other computers to provide them most of the resources they need. These “thin clients” can run a rudimentary copy of an operating system and use any other needed resources from a networked location.

Operating in an on-demand computing enterprise model can allow licensing costs to decrease if the applications are configured in a terminal services environment. The licenses are available as needed but in some cases can be kept in a pool to allow all users to pull from the available copies only when the application is used, reducing the total license count. On-demand computing can also reduce management overhead for the environment and power consumption for an organization. These are possible because the applications used could be installed into a server farm one time and distributed using on-demand tools, like Citrix or other terminal services applications to present the application to users. This reduces the number of times an installation or deployment takes place.