Exploring the Advantages of Cloud Computing

Cloud Computing: An Overview

Cloud computing allows access to data and software over the internet, eliminating reliance on hard drives or SSDs. This facilitates convenient online backups of photos and private data, mitigating concerns about hardware crashes or viruses.

Cloud Provisioning

Cloud service providers invest heavily in storage hardware, data centers, and their maintenance, addressing temperature, security, humidity, hardware obsolescence, and more. Cloud provisioning encompasses various methods:

• Advance Provisioning: Clients contact providers, resources are prepared in advance, and fees are charged annually or monthly.
• Dynamic Provisioning: Resources are assigned as needed, often on a pay-per-use basis.
• User Self-Provisioning: Users purchase resources online with rapid availability.

Types of Clouds

(based on a cloud location): Public, Private and Hybrid.

A Public cloud is based on service providers relying on the Internet to make applications, programs, or storage obtainable for the general civic community, they can be free or payed for.

A private cloud means that a cloud network is only used by one company or individual, and is not accessible with anyone else. It also can be stored onsite or offsite, but it is a lot cheaper to be stored offsite.

Where a Hybrid cloud means using both private and public clouds, reliant on the company’s goals. For example, a private cloud can be used to contact with people or clients and the databases will be stored through a private cloud.

Also, clouds can be classified based upon the service they offer, the most known cloud service is offering storage and virtual servers, this is called Infrastructure-as-a-Service(IaaS).

Where if the cloud is offering a development platform like OS’s or databases, this is called Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), some examples are Microsoft Azure and Google App Engine.

Finally, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) means that clients can gain access to numerous software and applications on pay-per-use basis, instead of buying these software and programs directly which is more expensive. Examples include Google Docs, Microsoft Word online.

There are many benefits of cloud computing, companies and enterprises can provide applications to users and clients without worrying about costs of infrastructure or maintenance which gives them flexibility.

Clients can access data and programs from anywhere as long as they have an Internet connection. Also in case of a disaster or hardware failure all data can be recovered from the cloud because they are backed up on more than one server.

But as any service that exist on the Internet, cloud computing and services have challenges concerning security also. Cloud service providers have to worry about protecting their hardware, what happens in case of a failure or a disaster, how to authenticate the identity of the end user, and the security of data from outside attackers.

Overall the benefits of cloud computing outweigh the risks, the concept gave us a more convenient way of accessing data and made services much easier delivered to us by helping organisations also.