Monday, March 2, 2015

Cloud Computing Overview


Cloud computing is a comparatively new and growing idea in the IT World today. It was an output of the need for computing on the go.. With cloud computing a user can have access to applications, storage and data that are not on a user’s own computer, and he will be charged very less as per the usage of the same.  It can me thought of in a simple way as – the Electricity board or power grid supplying power to a home. They charge the user as per his usage, which is metered.

Cloud  computing is a type of computing where all the IT / computing resources can be shared by users over the internet in the form of services, in an on-demand basis, without having to have all those locally.
Cloud computing also called "The Cloud" is reffered to "The internet based computing", as the computing resources are made available over the internet.

There are 3 main areas of operation in a cloud computing which are as follows:


Traditional business applications have always been very complicated and expensive. The amount and variety of hardware and software required to run them are very high. We also require a very good team of experts to install, configure, run and maintain, and secure and also keep updating them time to time. Even after having all those hardware and software in place, there are time when some of the best IT departments even in the biggest companies fall short of resources. So is the case with the small and mid-size companies as well.

We can see that many business applications are moving on to the cloud and we can see this steadily gaining momentum over the last few years. The future for cloud computing looks bright, as the coming years promises new and innovative ways collaboration through several types of devices including mobile devices via cloud computing.

The beauty of cloud computing lies in the fact that the customer who makes use of any cloud service does not need to worry about maintenance costs, updates, patches, or licence fees etc... Just use the service and pay for it as per the pricing terms.

Now let us see how it works..
In a cloud computing system, there's a significant workload shift. Local computers no longer have to do all the heavy lifting when it comes to running applications. The network of computers that make up the cloud handles them instead. Hardware and software demands on the user's side decrease. The only thing the user's computer needs to be able to run is the cloud computing system's interface software, which can be as simple as a Web browser, and the cloud's network takes care of the rest.
There's a good chance you've already used some form of cloud computing. If you have an e-mail account with a Web-based e-mail service like Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail or Gmail, then you've had some experience with cloud computing. Instead of running an e-mail program on your computer, you log in to a Web e-mail account remotely. The software and storage for your account doesn't exist on your computer -- it's on the service's computer cloud.

The goal of cloud computing is to apply traditional super-computing, or high-performance computing power, normally used for research and defence purposes, to perform tens of trillions of computations per second, in consumer-oriented applications, to deliver personalized information, to provide data storage or to power large, immersive computer games.
To get this done, cloud computing uses networks of large groups of servers usually running low-cost consumer PC technology with specialized connections to spread data-processing chores across them. This shared IT infrastructure contains large pools of systems that are linked together. Often, virtualization techniques are used to maximize the power of cloud computing.


Some basic things regarding cloud computing:

  • Here computing resources can be accessed as services (like - Iaas, Paas, SaaS, etc..)
  • Cloud computing offers great flexibility in delivering IT services.
  • Cloud computing helps in refreshing the traditional IT infrastructure or adding new resources to it without a huge investment.
  • Cloud computing helps an organization to free up some staff from IT department, for other projects.
  • Cloud computing services are more economical when supporting more users and new IT services.

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