What is Cloud Computing?
Cloud computing is a way to increase capacity or add capabilities on a fly without the investment in new Infrastructure, training personnel for supporting the new Infrastructure or licensing new software. Cloud computing encompasses any subscription based or pay-per-use service that is available in real time over Internet. Cloud computing can deliver cloud based solution from full-blown applications to storage services. After some goggling I am able to collect a rough breakdown of what cloud computing is all about.
- SaaS (Software as a Service)
Saas delivers a single application through the browser to thousands of customers using a multi-tenant architecture. On the customer side, it means no upfront investment in servers or software licensing; on the provider side, with just one app to maintain, costs are low compared to conventional hosting.
- Utility Computing
Utility computing offers storage and virtual servers or even virtual datacenters that IT can use on demand. Some players offering this service are Sun, IBM and Amazon. Utility computing is currently used for supplemental and non-mission critical use, but soon it will replace few components from the Datacenter.
- Web services in the Cloud
Closely related to SaaS, Web service providers offer APIs that enable developers to exploit functionality over the Internet, rather than delivering full-blown applications
- Platform as a service
It is another variant of SaaS and it provides development environment as a service. Developers can build their own applications that run on the provider's infrastructure and are delivered to their users via the Internet from the provider's servers. You don't get complete freedom because these services are constrained by the vendor's design and capabilities.
- Managed Service Provider (MSP)
A Managed service is basically an application exposed to IT rather than to the end user. The MSP's may provide applications such as virus scanning, email or any other application monitoring service or desktop management service.
- Service Commerce Platforms (SCP)
A hybrid of SaaS and MSP, this cloud computing service offers a service hub that users interact with. They're most common in trading environments, such as expense management systems that allow users to order travel or secretarial services from a common platform that then coordinates the service delivery and pricing within the specifications set by the user.
Today for IT decision makers it is a challenge to decide which service they should be opting from Cloud due to security or control on data as some of the risk. In any case Cloud computing is a good solution for Small Organization who can leverage on the Private Cloud infrastructure instead of investing on the physical datacenter and maintaining it. It is also a good option for Medium Organization which can utilize the virtual datacenter on demand in Hybrid Cloud scenario for application testing or non mission critical applications.
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