Cloud Computing: Industry Impact

Organizations wanted a new IT solution which can reduce their cost, increase speed and a less time to market, increase security transparency, reduce complexity of managing  and a solution which can increase capacity utilization. This is where the cloud computing was born.

According to a research based on cloud computing, as the most important benefit majority of the potential cloud computing users voted the factor of enabling new services / products. As for the other important benefits they voted for reduction of cost and collaboration and information sharing. But in comparison less number of users considered mitigating business risk and helps to focus on core business as important benefits.

In Cloud computing market the highest demand is for IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) which includes provision of hardware and storage services and Saas(Software-as-a-service) which includes provision of software services such as CRM, ERP, etc.

Today more and more businesses move to the cloud even there are some challenges which cloud computing faces such as security, governance, fear of vendor lock and lack of standards. Cloud computing providers are continuously working on overcoming these barriers to provide better solutions for their customers. 

Three Building Blocks of Cloud Computing

IT professionals have identified three underlying services as the building blocks of cloud computing.


SaaS

Allows users to run existing online applications means it allows users to use a complete application which runs on someone else’s system. SaaS users can be benefited from free use of application or paying only for the subscription, collaborative working and accessing from any computer.
Google, Microsoft, Zoho can be identified as the well-known SaaS providers.


PaaS

Allows users to create their own cloud applications by using provider specific languages and tools and run them on systems software and hardware provided by another company. PaaS users can be benefited from rapid development at low cost and selection of private or public deployment.
Google App engine, Microsoft Azure, Salseforce – Force.com can be identified as the well-known PaaS providers.


IaaS

Allows users to run any application they pleased on cloud hardware such servers or storage of their choice. There are four cloud hardware option users can choose.

• Private Cloud – in private cloud specific number of physical servers are dedicated to one customer.
• Dedicated Hosting – in dedicated hosting customers rent physical servers on demand with the cost of number of servers matching requirements.
• Hybrid Hosting – it is a mix of physical servers and virtual server instances. They are rented on demand in order to reduce cost and further increase flexibility.
• Cloud Hosting – where customers run virtual server instances on demand.

Amazon, Rackspace can be identified as the well-known IaaS providers.

Introduction to Cloud Computing

In simple words, cloud computing is the general term used for anything that involves delivering hosted services over the internet.

Cloud computing is becoming an increasingly broader topic that covers everything from Google Apps to data centers to virtualization to SaaS (Software-as-a-service), PaaS (Platform-as-a-service), IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-service). Cloud computing is considered as the way to save money and this factor has highly influenced on attracting the world wide technology executives towards cloud computing.

Today business organizations have started demanding more for cloud services other than traditional hosting as it delivers more benefits to the companies.

By using cloud services companies can get the major advantage of:

• Focus on their core business without getting worried about the technology
• Benefit through improved reliability
• Implement faster
• Pay only for what they use
• Predictable cost
• Reduced overall cost - No hardware cost, lower upfront costs and reduced infrastructure costs.
• Easy to grow your applications.
• Everything managed under service level agreement.
• Supports green computing (overall environmental benefit from lower carbon emission and efficient sharing of large systems)

Key players in cloud computing includes: IBM, HP, Google, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Salesforce.com, NetSuite, VMware as well as dozens of others.