Cloud Computing: What, Why and How

Cloud Computing has advanced from the buzzword to the dynamic infrastructure, which is currently adopted by the slew of organizations. The latest innovations in cloud computing are making business applications even more mobile and collaborative.

"Cloud" is really an umbrella term for a variety of technologies and services. A cloud can be a private or public and hybrid or community.

Public Cloud: Computing infrastructure is hosted at the vendor’s premises. A public cloud can sell services to anyone on the Internet. The client has no visibility over the location of the infrastructure.

Private Cloud: The services are dedicated to the customer and are not shared with other organisations. They are pricey and are considered more secure than Public Clouds.

Hybrid Cloud: Organisations run some significant, secure applications in private clouds. The not so sensitive applications are hosted in the public cloud. The combination is known as Hybrid Cloud.

Community Cloud: The least known cloud infrastructure, which is shared between the organizations of the same community. For example, all the government agencies in a city can share the same cloud but not the non government agencies.

The above mentioned clouds were classified on the basis of location where the cloud is hosted. Now, let’s categorize them on the basis of service provided.

Infrastructure as a Service (IAAS): Hardware related services are offered practising the principles of Cloud Computing. These include disk storage, networks and virtual servers. Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Rackspace Cloud Servers are some of the leading vendors.

Platform as a service (PAAS): Provides virtualized servers on which clients can operate existing applications or develop new ones without bothering about the operating systems, server hardware, load balancing or computing capacity. Microsoft's Azure and Salesforce's Force.com, falls in this category.

Software as a service (SAAS): This is the most commonly used form of cloud computing. It is absolute software offering on the cloud. They are accessed by the customers on pay per use basis. Salesforce.com’s CRM, Gmail and Hotmail are prime examples of SAAS.

Many industry analysts would agree that a business nowadays just can’t work without cloud computing considering the multitude of services it offers.

The first prime benefit is that it controls cost, which aids maintaining infrastructures and other applications. Secondly, clouds are elastic and can adapt to the changing business needs. Far better than the traditional methods, Cloud computing has a quick deployment model that facilitates applications to grow swiftly to equal the increasing usage requirements.

So, overall Cloud computing renders an interesting way to scale computing capacity based on shifting needs, while lowering the operating cost of IT services.

Cloud computing is definitely changing the way, how most people use the web and how they store their files.

In a cloud computing system, there's a significant workload shift. It removes the burden of heavy applications from Local computers. The network of computers that make up the cloud runs those applications. Hardware and software demands on the user's side shrink. The only thing the user's computer needs to run is the cloud computing system's interface software, which can be as trouble-free as a Web browser, and the cloud's network takes care of the rest.

Many companies are tapping into the idea of letting someone else manage the infrastructure, while they just plug in the information. Cloud computing is surely opening world of opportunities for IT industry.