Cloud Computing for Business Users

Cloud Computing

Nowadays everyone talks about cloud computing and virtualization. I am just curious on how I could explain Cloud computing to a business user – the outcome is this blog. Cloud computing revolves around three things namely; software as a service (SAAS), platform as a service (PAAS) and infrastructure as a service (IAAS).

What is Cloud Computing?

Cloud computing means services are offered over internet. It could be any of the three services: Software, Hardware or a platform. Typically these services will be provided based on the customer demand. Consumers requesting these services can use these services as little as possible. The whole cloud will be managed by a Third Party Vendor.

Types of Clouds

There are types of clouds: Private Cloud – This cloud is maintained on a private network in a datacenter catering to set of specified customers. Public Cloud – This cloud sells services to public internet. Google apps and Amazon Web services are examples of public cloud.

Traditional way of hosting application involves identifying servers, storage and network procurement of those infrastructure for the application. Instead of procuring servers, storage, Database and networks, IAAS allows customer to use the resources available on the cloud. Since these infrastructure services are offered based on the usage, customer has the flexibility to scale up and scale down when required. Amazon Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) provides web services to compute the capacity in the cloud. Developers can scale up / down the environment based on the requirement using these web services. Amazon also allows automatic scaling according to the conditions defined.  This is especially useful for the applications which need variable usage at different timings. High memory instances up to 68 GB memory and high CPU instances up to 8 Virtual cores are possible with this type of services.

SAAS refers to software offered based on demand. Customer need not build the software from scratch or buy that for a huge sum of money. Instead, the software is available based on the usage and on demand. Vendor may collect a monthly fee or yearly fee for the usage of software. Like how a rented room at hotel serves different people at different days, this software serves multiple customers at different times. This feature is called multi-tenancy.

In the PAAS model, Cloud provides both the infrastructure and software to run their applications. Customer need not worry about the infrastructure to procure or the different software that are required to develop a particular application.  Typical PAAS model is offered by Google Apps. Google apps automatically save the data / work in the cloud.

Opportunities in Cloud Computing

·         Privacy – The cloud provider can monitor the data and usage pattern of the hosted applications. Many customers are not comfortable sharing their data or customer usage pattern. This is one of the improvement / opportunity area where cloud providers need to make progress

·         Security – Cloud computing offers many benefits at the same time it is vulnerable to threats related to security as well. This is another area where cloud providers can concentrate and improve the security of the data.