Sunday, February 16, 2014

Cloud Computing

Over the last five decades, businesses that use computing resources have learned to contend with a vast array of buzzwords. Much of this geek-speak or marketing vapour, over time, has been guilty of making promises that often are never kept. Some promises, to be sure, have been delivered, although others have drifted into oblivion. When it comes to offering technology in a pay-as-you-use services model, most Information Technology (IT) professionals have heard it all—from allocated resource management to grid computing, to on-demand computing and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), to utility computing. A new buzzword, cloud computing, is presently in vogue in the marketplace, and it is generating all sorts of confusion about what it actually represents.

1 What is Cloud Computing?
The term "cloud" is analogical to "Internet". The term "Cloud Computing" is based on cloud drawings used in the past to represent telephone networks and later to depict Internet in. Cloud computing is Internet based computing where virtual shared servers provide software, infrastructure, platform, devices and other resources and hosting to customers on a pay-as-you-use basis. All information that a digitized system has to offer is provided as a service in the cloud computing model. Users can access these services available on the "Internet cloud" without having any previous know-how on managing the resources involved. Thus, users can concentrate more on their core business processes rather than spending time and gaining knowledge on resources needed to manage their business processes.
Cloud computing customers do not own the physical infrastructure; rather they rent the usage from a third-party provider. This helps them to avoid huge . They consume resources as a service and pay only for resources that they use. Most cloud computing infrastructures consist of services delivered through common centers and built on servers. Sharing resources amongst can improve, as servers are not unnecessarily left idle, which can reduce costs significantly while increasing the speed of application development.

2 Why Cloud Computing?
The cloud makes it possible for you to access your information from anywhere at any time. While a traditional computer setup requires you to be in the same location as your data storage device, the cloud takes away that step. The cloud removes the need for you to be in the same physical location as the hardware that stores your data. Your cloud provider can both own and house the hardware and software necessary to run your home or business applications.
This is especially helpful for businesses that cannot afford the same amount of hardware and storage space as a bigger company. Small companies can store their information in the cloud, removing the cost of purchasing and storing memory devices. Additionally, because you only need to buy the amount of storage space you will use, a business can purchase more space or reduce their subscription as their business grows or as they find they need less storage space. One requirement is that you need to have an internet connection in order to access the cloud. The benefit is that you can access that same document from wherever you are with any device that can access the internet. These devices could be a desktop, laptop, tablet, or phone.
This can also help your business to function more smoothly because anyone who can connect to the internet and your cloud can work on documents, access software, and store data.

3 Types of Cloud
There are different types of clouds that you can subscribe to depending on your needs. As a home user or small business owner, you will most likely use public cloud services.

3.1 Private Cloud
Private clouds dedicate servers to specific customers or customer groups. Access may be by secure Internet session or over a virtual private network. Purely from a server standpoint, they cannot offer the same economy of scale as a public cloud. With good capacity planning for a sufficiently large number of server instances, can still be cheaper than in-house server farms because the data structure infrastructure is shared.
The servers in a private cloud could actually be located on the customer's premises, but managed by a third party.

3.2 Public Cloud
In public clouds, access is over the Internet, although it may use per-session host-to host security and sometimes on-demand VPNs. The physical servers are shared among multiple customers of the cloud.
Public clouds offer the greatest economy of scale, but also raise security concerns. Public clouds are more efficient from the service provider standpoint, giving better resource utilization and potentially giving more opportunities for disaster recovery, but they present additional security concerns. In other cases, there are technical security concerns, such as the potential ability of a virtual machine instance to snoop on a paused virtual machine instance of another computer, the paused image residing on the same physical server disk. Public clouds have also suffered from availability problems, when compared to enterprise networks built for reliability.
 

                                                          Figure: Types of Cloud
 
3.3 Hybrid Cloud
A hybrid cloud is a composition of at least one private cloud and at least one public cloud. A hybrid cloud is typically offered in one of two ways: a vendor has a private cloud and forms a partnership with a public cloud provider, or a public cloud provider forms a partnership with a vendor that provides private cloud platforms.
A hybrid cloud is a cloud computing environment in which an organization provides and manages some resources in-house and has others provided externally. For example, an organization might use a public cloud service, such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for archived data but continue to maintain in-house storage for operational customer data. Ideally, the hybrid approach allows a business to take advantage of the scalability and cost-effectiveness that a public cloud computing environment offers without exposing mission-critical applications and data to third-party vulnerabilities. This type of hybrid cloud is also referred to as hybrid IT.

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