You may have heard the term cloud computing thrown around a lot recently, but you may still be confused about what exactly it means. Most people understand that it’s something to do with the Internet, but beyond that it’s hard to make sense of the hype surrounding cloud computing and its implications for IT professionals in businesses everywhere.
What Is Cloud Computing?
Cloud computing is a series of internet-based services that allow consumers to access data in convenient and easy ways. The concept, which first became popular in 2006 with Amazon Web Services, has slowly been changing how people use technology. While many people assume cloud computing refers to companies offering things like hardware or server space over the internet (e.g., Google Docs), it’s more than that.
How Does it Work?
There is no shortage of cloud computing services. In fact, you can see that it’s just a matter of figuring out which ones work best for your needs. The first step in doing so is to understand how these services work and what they offer to users. Let’s take a look at a few: First and foremost, SaaS (Software as a Service) providers charge customers on an ongoing basis rather than a one-time payment basis like traditional software.
Advantages of Using a Cloud Service Provider
A cloud service provider is a company that offers computing resources as a service to their clients. The main advantage of using such services is that it reduces your costs and allows you to focus on other aspects of your business. You no longer have to invest in infrastructure like servers, software licenses, network or physical security because all these things are now taken care of by your cloud service provider. you will have access to high-end resources without having to worry about maintaining them or upgrading them yourself.
Types of Cloud Services
When we talk about cloud computing services, there are mainly five types of cloud services which we can get. They are as follows: Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS),Desktop as a Service (DaaS) and Infrastructure Management as a Service(IMaaS). To understand these services, let us see
what all types of service is provided by each type of cloud service in detail.
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Software as a Service –
Also known as Saas, provides packaged software over the internet to customers. The most common example is Salesforce. It allows small companies to have its own CRM without any capital expenditure on servers or installation costs required for software installation such as Microsoft Dynamics CRM or Oracle CRM On Demand for midsize companies.
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Platform as a Service –
This is an open source approach to build online applications using PaaS. In other words it provides a platform on which third party applications can be built and deployed easily across multiple platforms like Iphone, Android etc using programming languages such as PHP, Ruby or Java etc. One example of PaaS used by many startups is Heroku which hosts various open source web apps through Amazon EC2 instances running Linux operating systems.
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Infrastructure as a Service –
This is best suited for hosting your website/applications on cloud infrastructure. AWS Elastic Beanstalk and Google App Engine come under the IaaS model where you just upload your application code along with database schema i.e., you don’t need to worry about provisioning hardware resources, operating systems, database administration or security patches at all.
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Desktop as a Service –
Popularly called DaaS, provides access to computer desktops remotely. Apple iCloud also comes under the desktop service category.
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Infrastructure Management as a Service –
This covers monitoring and support activities required to keep cloud computing services up and running. It covers application management tools that help enterprises manage their Web applications after they move them into public clouds such as New Relic, Zendesk support etc.
