CLOUD COMPUTING – A ROADMAP TO SUCCESS IN COMPUTATIONS

It is the on demand delivery of computing services over the internet. It is fast and easy. Cloud is a secured place to run business software like Customer Relationship Management applications. It’s Software that users can access at any time, from any place and from any device. Cloud computing started at the end of 1990’s.

With Cloud, a person just needs to login and start working. They need not go to his office desk every time they want to update anything. This happens without having to buy any hardware, software to install and upgrade frequently. It’s all the responsibility of the cloud computing company that runs the applications. There are numerous companies that provide the cloud computing services in a secure way.

We can create our own social, mobile applications and run them on the cloud. Business applications are becoming even more mobile. Life has become unthinkable without the cloud. Without it there is no Gmail, No Twitter, No Facebook etc Millions of organizations across the globe are dependent on Cloud Computing.

Cloud Computing has several benefits for business and end-users. Some of the benefits of Cloud Computing are as follows:

• Self-service Provisioning

  
  End users can use the computer resources to any kind of workload. It avoids the traditional way of IT administrators to allocate and manage the computer resources.

• Elasticity

  
  This helps the companies to avoid heavy investments on resources as companies can scale-up and scale-down depending on the need.

• Pay-per-use

  
  Computer resources are measured and users have to pay only for the resources that they have used.

Cloud Computing Services can be Private, Public or Hybrid.

• Private Cloud Computing

  
  Here services are delivered to internal users from business data center.

• Public Cloud Computing

  
  This service is provided through the internet from third-party provider. Some of the public leading cloud providers include:
  • Amazon Web Services
  • Microsoft AzureIBM Soft Layer
  • Google Compute Engine
  • Hybrid Cloud Computing

• Hybrid Cloud Computing

  
  It’s a combination of both private and public cloud computing. The goal of this computing service is to take advantage of all the public computing service while still maintaining/keeping the sensitive applications private.

Cloud Computing Service Categories are broadly categorized into 3 types.

• Infrastructure as a Service

  
  This service providers like Amazon Web Services give a virtual server, Application Programming Interface and storage. Users can configure the Virtual Machine as per their requirement.
  There is no need to invest on their infrastructure.

• Platform as a Service

  
  These service providers Infrastructure will contain the development tools which can be accessed by the end-user through gateway software, API or web portals.
  It helps to reduce the complexity.
  Some of the Platform Service providers include:
  
  • AWS Elastic Beanstalk
  • Google App Engine
  • Force.Com
  • Software as a Service
  
  

• Software as a Service

  
  These run on the distant computers (Cloud) and connect to the user computer via the internet.
  Here the software applications are provided over the internet. These applications are generally referred to as web services.
  No data is lost as data is on the cloud.

Cloud Computing security remains the major concern for many businesses as Public cloud computing is a multi-tenant environment. Here the underlying hardware infrastructure is shared between multiple clients. Access and computing resources are secured by log-on credentials. However this risk is reducing over the time as data encryption and Access Management Tools have improved

Some of the great things of Cloud Computing are:

• Fast Implementation

  – Reduces the complexity of setting up and running the applications. It can be done in few days rather than months or years.

• Less Costs

  – With Cloud computing capital expenditure costs are reduced greatly.

• Instant Scalability

  – With the applications on the cloud, we can increase or decrease the number of users.

• Maintenance free

  – Upgrading, testing everything is done in the cloud.

• Access anywhere

  – These applications are securely accessed from anywhere around the globe.

• Better Security

  – No data is lost. All data is securely stored on the cloud.