Computing Cloud Strategies

Cloud Computing is a computing paradigm where services and data reside in shared resources in scalable data centers, and those services and data are accessible by any authenticated device over the Internet. It is one the most significant trend today, and is getting a lot of praise as an approach to rapidly include new computing facility and reduction of costs. Many enterprises and firms like Intel as well as AMD are working hard to determine how best can they expand this immature technology called Cloud.

 However some factors are not allowing enterprises to widespread adoption of the external clouds. These include security risks, immature technology and few other concerns for the firms .As the technology is still in development and testing phase so it is prone to security risks and delay in executing the service within time. Intel’s strategy for the cloud computing is based on developing the cloud from the inside out. They already started an internal virtualized computing environment to increase Cloud attributes with the passage of time and this internal environment is swiftly expanding and evolving in the laboratories of Intel.

Three categories of external Cloud are :

Software as a service (SaaS): Software deployed as a hosted service and accessed over the Internet.
Platform as a service (PaaS): Platforms that can be used to deploy applications provided by customers or partners of the PaaS provider.
Infrastructure as a service (IaaS): Computing infrastructure, such as servers, storage, and network, delivered as a cloud service, typically through virtualization.

Obviously a lot of applications are not apt to hosting in external clouds looking at the present development. Only those applications that have low security disclosure and that are not mission-critical or competitive differentiators for the corporation.

A strategy of growing the cloud from the inside out delivers many of the benefits of cloud computing and it will effectively utilize external clouds over time. It is expected that enterprises will slowly and selectively migrate services to external clouds as supplier offerings mature, enterprise adoption barriers are overcome, and opportunities crop up for enhanced flexibility, agility and lower costs.

Read More

What is Computing Clouds

A cloud service has three distinct characteristics that differentiate it from traditional hosting. It is sold on demand, typically by the minute or the hour; it is elastic -- a user can have as much or as little of a service as they want at any given time; and the service is fully managed by the provider.
 
    Cloud computing is a general term for anything that involves delivering hosted services over the Internet. These services are broadly divided into three categories: Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).    
     
 The name cloud computing was inspired by the cloud symbol that's often used to represent the Internet in flowcharts and diagrams.

Computing Cloud

     A cloud service has three distinct characteristics that differentiate it from traditional hosting. It is sold on demand, typically by the minute or the hour; it is elastic -- which means that a user can have as much or as little of a service as they want at any given time; and the service is fully managed by the provider (the consumer needs nothing but a personal computer and Internet access).
           Significant innovations in virtualization and distributed computing, as well as improved access to high-speed Internet and a weak economy, have accelerated interest in cloud computing. A cloud can be private or public.

     A public cloud sells services to anyone on the Internet. (Currently, Amazon Web Services is the largest public cloud provider.) A private cloud is a proprietary network or a data center that supplies hosted services to a limited number of people. When a service provider uses public cloud resources to create their private cloud, the result is called a virtual private cloud. Private or public, the goal of cloud computing is to provide easy, scalable access to computing resources and IT services. Infrastructure-as-a-Service like Amazon Web Services provides the customer with virtual server instances and storage, as well as application program interfaces (APIs) that allow the customer to start, stop, access and configure their virtual servers and storage.


This model allows a company to pay for only as much capacity as is needed, and bring more online as soon as required. Because this pay-for-what-you-use model resembles the way electricity, fuel and water are consumed, it's sometimes referred to as utility computing. Platform-as-a-service in the cloud is defined as a set of software development tools hosted on the provider's infrastructure. Developers create applications on the provider's platform over the Internet. PaaS providers may use APIs, website portals or gateway software installed on the customer's computer. Force.com, (an outgrowth of Salesforce.com) and GoogleApps are examples of PaaS. Developers need to know that currently, there are not standards for interoperability or data portability in the cloud. Some providers will not allow software created by their customers to be moved off the provider's platform. In the software-as-a-service cloud model, the vendor supplies the hardware infrastructure, the software product and interacts with the user through a front-end portal. SaaS is a very broad market. Services can be anything from Web-based email to inventory control and database processing. Because the service provider hosts both the application and the data, the end user is free to use the service from anywhere.

Read More