Cloud Computing Services

November 30, 2011 Cloud Computing Services

Cloud Computing Services

Cloud Computing is a huge emerging buzz all around now-a-days. Every software development company has started offering cloud computing services because of its unique features and benefits. People are becoming more and more aware about the USPs of this latest technology. Let us view from the base itself that what actually Cloud computing is all about.

As per Wikipedia, Cloud Computing is the delivery of computing as a service rather than a product, whereby shared resources, software and information are provided to computers and other devices as a utility (like the electricity grid) over a network (typically the Internet).

Cloud computing is very much similar to a concept where a user consumes electricity from a power grid without even knowing the infrastructure used for generating that electricity or the components used for generation.

In Cloud Computing, a central remote server is used which maintains all the data and applications.

The user is only required to access those resources via internet irrespective of installation of any application or any special configuration in order to access the required data. As all the resources like processing, memory, storage and bandwidth are centralized, so it increases the efficiency of the computing. For example, we access Hotmail, Gmail or Yahoo mail on our systems without actually downloading any special software or configuring a server. We just need to have internet connectivity and we can very well go ahead and use our mail accounts.

Cloud computing basically comprises of three segments:

Cloud computing applications
Cloud computing platforms
Cloud computing infrastructure

Cloud computing applications are the applications or the software that are implemented or hosted on the cloud by which various services are provided to the users such as email, chat. On the other hand, Cloud computing platform is the platform or the operating system on which the applications are installed such as windows server, RHEL server or Solaris server. Cloud computing infrastructure includes the know-how of the physical configuration on which that platform is going to be installed like the processor, storage, memory, network connection etc.

Various software development companies involved in the business of providing cloud services offers two types of cloud computing services.

Public cloud: This is a traditional type of cloud service in which the resources are finely grained and provided to the users over internet via web application or web services. This is absolutely free of cost service.
Community cloud: This is completely different from public cloud service. Here, in a community cloud, several organizations having almost similar requirements commonly share the resources and the infrastructure. This is beneficial as it divides the cost of cloud between the community members. Moreover, Community cloud has high level of security, privacy and also it has to follow certain policies before starting up with the services.

The concept of cloud computing was very much there few years ago, but as the small level organizations were not so familiar with the cloud, so this technology was not so popular and known to everyone. It has started gaining its importance from last two years or so as now every software product development organization whether small or large are using this service extensively. Cloud computing has allowed them to get a very high level of infrastructure at a much reduced cost. Even, the companies that can not afford to implement good configuration servers or who do not have a very secure environment are taking up cloud services for their work.

Cloud computing services, no doubt, help companies in providing better services to their clients but also they are one of the cost-effective services used by many IT firms. 

 

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