Cloud computing is the latest topic around the water cooler. Cost reduction, an increase in flexibility, and improvement in IT's responsiveness to the business – what’s not to like Leveraging a cloud environment can definitely maximize the value IT provides to your business and your customers. But for those of you who are newcomers to the cloud computing world, you may wonder, what is cloud computing
The Cloud can be described as an Internet platform. Traditionally, we would buy hardware (like a standard PC, for example) and install some software on it (like an accounts package or an office suite like MS Office). So you have software that runs on your machine in your own office or home.
With the Cloud, however, the software and hardware runs completely on the Internet. You could actually refer to Cloud Computing as Internet Computing. So, in simple terms, we can say that any software or hardware running on the Internet is Cloud Computing.
The services that cloud provides are divided into three categories: Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). As a matter of fact, the name cloud computing was inspired by the cloud symbol that's often used to represent the Internet in flowcharts and diagrams.
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 data center that supplies hosted services to a limited number of consumers. 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 access to computing resources and IT services.
