As the organizations (be it the government or the business sector) are looking for ways to cut on their costs, they are plotting new strategies that are more efficient. One of these options is cloud computing. It is a great way to reduce IT expenditures, improve scalability and reduce administration over head.
With this technology, instead of all the computer hardware and software that you are using, it is provided for you as a service by another company and it can be accessed via the Internet. Its hardware and software doesn’t matter to you as a user. It is somewhere up in the nebulous ‘cloud’ and is being represented by the internet. For others, cloud computing is defined as a service that is provided over the Internet or a similar network, while for some, it can be defined as any bought-in computer service that you use and sits outside your firewall.
Cloud computing has been credited with a number of advantages. It is being used to enhance the ability to achieve business goals. It is used as an infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS). With IaaS, it acts as an infrastructure on a pay-per-use scheme. These are self-service models to monitor, access, and manage remote datacenter infrastructures. Examples of its usage are compute (virtualized or bare metal), networking, storage, and networking services. With this, users can then purchase IaaS based on consumption, similar to electricity or other utility billing.
However some organizations turn to PaaS to increase the speed of development on a ready-to-use platform to deploy applications. PaaS are being used for applications, and other development, while at the same time providing cloud components to software. For developers, they’ll have a framework that they can build upon to develop or customize applications. The advantage with using this is it makes the development, testing, and deployment of applications quick, cost-effective, and simple.
When using cloud, there are two instances where organizations are looking for ways to evaluate some of the applications they intend to deploy into their environment through the use of a cloud. In the case of test and development that may be limited in time, they may adopt a hybrid cloud approach.
With cloud computing, you can tap into vast quantities of both structured and unstructured data in order to harness the benefit of extracting business value. The data derived from consumers’ buying patterns will be used to target the advertising and marketing campaigns to a certain segment of the population.
Meanwhile, you can also store, access, and retrieve your files from any web-enabled interface with the use of cloud computing. Another benefit derived from using cloud is the cost effectiveness of a disaster recovery (DR) solution. It provides you a faster recovery from different physical locations at a much lesser cost.
One of the uses of cloud computing is to backup data. Such task has always been a complex and time-consuming operation. With cloud-based backup, you are able to automatically dispatch data to wherever location across the wire and with the assurance that neither security, availability nor capacity are issues.
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