Cloud Computing Basic Questions
Cloud computing means that instead of all the computer hardware and software you’re using sitting on your desktop, or somewhere inside your company’s network, it’s provided for you as a service by another company and accessed over the Internet, usually in a completely seamless way. Exactly where the hardware and software is located and how it all works doesn’t matter to you, the user—it’s just somewhere up in the nebulous “cloud” that the Internet represents.
Simply put, cloud computing is the delivery of computing services—including servers, storage, databases, networking, software, analytics, and intelligence—over the Internet (“the cloud”) to offer faster innovation, flexible resources, and economies of scale. You typically pay only for cloud services you use, helping lower your operating costs, run your infrastructure more efficiently and scale as your business needs change.
Top benefits of cloud computing
Cloud computing is a big shift from the traditional way businesses think about IT resources. Here are seven common reasons organisations are turning to cloud computing services:
Cost
Cloud computing eliminates the capital expense of buying hardware and software and setting up and running on-site datacenters—the racks of servers, the round-the-clock electricity for power and cooling, the IT experts for managing the infrastructure. It adds up fast.
Speed
Most cloud computing services are provided self service and on demand, so even vast amounts of computing resources can be provisioned in minutes, typically with just a few mouse clicks, giving businesses a lot of flexibility and taking the pressure off capacity planning.
Global scale
The benefits of cloud computing services include the ability to scale elastically. In cloud speak, that means delivering the right amount of IT resources—for example, more or less computing power, storage, bandwidth—right when it is needed and from the right geographic location.
Productivity
On-site datacenters typically require a lot of “racking and stacking”—hardware setup, software patching, and other time-consuming IT management chores. Cloud computing removes the need for many of these tasks, so IT teams can spend time on achieving more important business goals.
Performance
The biggest cloud computing services run on a worldwide network of secure datacenters, which are regularly upgraded to the latest generation of fast and efficient computing hardware. This offers several benefits over a single corporate datacenter, including reduced network latency for applications and greater economies of scale.
Reliability
Cloud computing makes data backup, disaster recovery and business continuity easier and less expensive because data can be mirrored at multiple redundant sites on the cloud provider’s network.
Security
Many cloud providers offer a broad set of policies, technologies and controls that strengthen your security posture overall, helping protect your data, apps and infrastructure from potential threats.
Types of cloud computing services
Cloud computing services are delivered in three main models, each of which offers customers different levels of support and flexibility. There’s also some overlap between all three of them, so it can get a little confusing when trying to get your head around what they all mean. These services are occasionally known as the cloud computing ‘stack’ as they are often built on top of one another. Knowing what each one of them is, and how they work, will give you a clearer sign about which service might be best suited to your needs and requirements.
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
Also known as utility computing, this is the on-demand delivery of computing infrastructure. That means everything – from operating systems and storage to networking and components – is outsourced to a cloud computing company or service. As the individual or the company, you’ll buy what you need on a pay-as-you-go model.
The simplest example of IaaS cloud computing is ordinary web-hosting. This is where you pay a monthly fee or by megabyte/gigabyte to have a company host your files from their servers. IaaS is an extremely flexible option, as it permits the user to customise the infrastructure of the computing environment. From web-hosting to big data analytics, IaaS covers the whole spectrum.