Cloud Computing

CLOUD COMPUTING

      Cloud Computing is a model of delivering computing resources from the Internet to the user. It enables convenient for, on demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction. Services and solutions that are delivered and consumed in real time over internet are cloud services. Cloud computing enables companies to consume computer resources such as virtual machine. The cloud infrastructure is much more powerful and reliable than personal computing devices. The storage solutions provide the users and enterprises with various capabilities to store and process their data in either privately owned or third party data centers that may be located far from the users ranging in distance from across a city to across the world.

            Cloud Computing is a result of evolution and adoption of existing technologies and paradigms. The goal of cloud computing is to allow users to take benefit from all the technologies, without the need for deep knowledge about or expertise with each one of them. The main enabling technology for cloud computing is virtualization. Virtualization software separates a physical computing device into one or more “virtual” devices, each of which can be easily used and managed to perform computing tasks. Virtualization provides the agility required to speed up the operations and reduces the cost by increasing infrastructure utilization. Cloud Computing adopts the concepts from Service Oriented Architecture that can help the user break the problems into services that can be integrated to provide a solution. It provides a tools and technologies to build data and compute intensive parallel applications with much more affordable prices compared to traditional parallel computing techniques. Cloud computing also leverages concepts from utility computing to provide metrics for the services used. Such metrics are at the core of the public cloud pay-per-use models.

Characteristics of Cloud Computing

·        Easy Access

Cloud based applications and files can be accessed easily on your company’s   network, whether you or your employees are in the office, at home, or traveling.

·        Reduced Cost

For the most part, cloud based applications only need to be purchased once, and are then distributed among users accessing the front-facing platform through the cloud. There is no need to buy multiple licenses for the same program for every one of your employees.

·        Enhanced Productivity

With the ability to pull data from anywhere within your company’s cloud, your employees will be able to work faster without needing to either physically get the files, or wait on an email response back for a file.

• High Growth Potential

As you add more employees, all that needs to be done to get them on the cloud is for them to have login credentials created. Less setup time, and much faster than installing software on a machine.

·        Real-Time Data Changes

As changes are made to files in the cloud, other people can have access to  those  changes  immediately.  Employees  no  longer  need  to  re-download files in order to have the most up to date version.

·        Data Security

Since there is only one place where all the data is stored, it is much easier to protect it against a security breach. Cloud computing takes away most of the threat of data theft due to information being spread out among multiple computers.

·        Device Operability

Some cloud-based networks are accessible from smart phones and tablets. This is convenient for people not in the office, but who still need to maintain connectivity to the network.

·        Easily Monitored Performance

Seeing changes made to data, and seeing who makes the changes, makes it easy to monitor employee performance. This can be done easily at the end of the day, or even in real time.

·        Open Communication among Collaborators

The ability to communicate easily among employees working on one project is essential. Cloud computing makes this simple with the ability to either message another collaborator, or just change the data as they see fit.

·        Reduced Maintenance

Fewer software-based problems will come up with a cloud based system. Employee computers are basically just terminals which access the cloud, meaning if a computer were to become inoperable, it could easily be replaced.

Types of Cloud

·        Public Cloud

·        Private Cloud

·        Hybrid Cloud

Public Cloud

          A public cloud is basically the internet. Service providers use the internet to make resources, such as applications (also known as Software-as-a-service) and storage, available to the general public, or on a ‘public cloud.Examples of public clouds include Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), IBM’s Blue Cloud, Sun Cloud, Google App Engine and Windows Azure Services  Platform.  For  users, these types of clouds  will  provide  the  best  economies  of  scale, are  inexpensive  to  set-up  because  hardware, application and bandwidth costs are covered by the provider.It’s a pay-per-usage model and the only costs incurred are based on the capacity that is used. There are some limitations, however; the public cloud may not be the right fit for every organization. The model can limit configuration, security, and SLA specificity, making it less-than-ideal for services using sensitive data that is subject to compliancy regulations. 

Private Cloud

Private clouds are data center architectures owned by a single company that provides flexibility, scalability, provisioning, automation and monitoring. The goal of a private cloud is not sell “as-a-service” offerings to external customers but instead to gain the benefits of cloud architecture without giving up the control of maintaining your own data center.

Private clouds can be expensive with typically modest economies of scale. This is usually not an option for the average Small-to-Medium sized business and is most typically put to use by large enterprises. Private clouds are driven by concerns around security and compliance, and keeping assets within the firewall.

     Hybrid Cloud         

By using  a hybrid  approach,  companies  can  maintain  control  of an internally managed private cloud while relying on the public cloud as needed.  For instance during peak periods individual applications, or portions of applications can be migrated to the Public Cloud.  This will also be beneficial during predictable outages: hurricane warnings, scheduled maintenance windows, rolling brown/blackouts.

The ability to maintain an off-premise disaster recovery site for most organizations is impossible due to cost. While there are lower cost solutions and alternatives the lower down the spectrum an organization gets, the capability to recover data quickly reduces. Cloud based Disaster Recovery (DR)/Business Continuity (BC) services allow organizations to contract fail over out  to  a Managed  Services  Provider  that  maintains  multi-tenant infrastructure for DR/BC, and specializes in getting business back online quickly.

Three Types of Cloud Computing Services

·        Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

·        Platform as a Service (PaaS)

·        Software as a Service (SaaS)

Infrastructure as a Service:

          The capability provided to the consumer is to provision processing, storage, networks, and other fundamental computing resources where the consumer is able to deploy and run arbitrary software, which can include operating  systems  and  applications.  The  consumer  does  not manage or control the underlying cloud infrastructure but has control over operating systems, storage, and deployed applications; and possibly limited control of select networking components (e.g., host firewalls).

Platform as a Service:

The capability provided to the consumer is to deploy onto the cloud infrastructure consumer-created or acquired applications created using programming languages, libraries, services, and tools supported by the provider. The  consumer  does  not  manage  or  control the underlying cloud infrastructure including network, servers, operating systems, or storage, but has control over the deployed applications and possibly configuration settings for the application-hosting environment.

Software as a Service:

The capability provided to the consumer is to use the provider’s applications running on a cloud infrastructure. The applications are accessible from various client devices through either a thin client interface, such as a web browser (e.g., web-based email), or a program interface. The consumer does not manage or control the underlying cloud infrastructure including network, servers, operating systems, storage, or even individual application capabilities, with the possible exception of limited user-specific application configuration settings.