Cloud Computing

There is a lot of buzz these days about cloud computing. But I see a lot of technocrats who still have wrong intuition about cloud computing. Let me throw some light on it.


Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is a category of computing solutions in which a technology and/or service lets users access computing resources on demand, as needed, whether the resources are physical or virtual, dedicated, or shared, and no matter how they are accessed (via a direct connection, LAN, WAN, or the Internet). The cloud is often characterized by self-service interfaces that let customers acquire resources when needed as long as needed. Cloud is also the concept behind an approach to building IT services that takes advantage of the growing power of servers and virtualization technologies.

Cloud computing's importance rests in the cloud's potential to save investment costs in infrastructure, to save time in application development and deployment, and to save resource allocation overhead.

Recently I met an employee from a leading investment bank and came to know how they are adopting cloud computing platform in their bank. Earlier when they were not using cloud platform if a software was to updated, it has to be updated on all the machines. Also, suppose a change is to made in a software which is separately installed on all machines. So, if that software is to be updated, the change has to be consistently carried out on all machines. But after they adopted the cloud platform, the change is to carried out only in the cloud which is automatically reflected on all the machines. This saves time and resources of the company. Hence, most of the companies are moving towards cloud platform.

What types of applications can run in the cloud?

So what type of applications can run in the cloud. Anything can run in a cloud, but that doesn't mean anything should run in a cloud. Any software that benefits the user by being resident on a desktop or workstation (system analysis tools, defragmentation utilities, etc.) would be better off remaining local. Also, sensitive customer data maybe should not be on a public cloud.

A cloud is right on target for applications that deal with IT management, business and productivity, development and deployment, capacity (server and/or storage), and collaboration.