What is Cloud Computing?
According to Wikipedia, cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage (cloud storage) and computing power, without direct active management by the user. The term is generally used to describe data centers available to many users over the Internet.
What is Cloud storage?
Cloud storage is the keeping of digital data in multiple servers and sometimes in multiple locations connected together by internet. The physical environment is typically owned and managed by a hosting company. Cloud Storage providers are responsible for keeping the data available, accessible, and secure. People and organizations buy or lease storage capacity from the providers to store user, organization, or application data.
Types of Clouds
Depending on how the “cloud” is deployed, there are three major types of clouds:
- Private Cloud
- Public Cloud
- Hybrid Cloud
Private cloud
A Private Cloud is cloud infrastructure operated solely for a single organization. It may be managed internally by the organization itself or by a third party contracted to manage it. In most cases private clouds are hosted by the organization itself but this requires significant resources in terms of hardware, expert staff to set up and run it. In addition, security requirement to run it can be a challenge. Self-run data centers are generally capital intensive. They have a significant physical footprint, requiring allocations of space, hardware, and environmental controls. These assets have to be refreshed periodically, resulting in additional capital expenditures.
Unless the data is so confidential that shared infrastructure is a definite NO, the economic model for a running a private cloud on your own may not justify the costs compared to the benefits. However, a company specialized in building clouds may provide cheaper solutions for a private cloud by sharing its scaled-up software resources and expertise with you and isolating this from the public by hosting the solution on your premises.
Public cloud
A Public Cloud is cloud infrastructure operated over public Internet using servers provided by the cloud operator rather those hosted in the premises of the organization. Architecturally, there are few differences between public- and private-cloud services, but security concerns increase substantially because applications, storage, and other resources are shared by multiple customers.
However, operators of these public clouds are very much aware of these challenges and therefore do provide the necessary isolation and security features that provide higher benefits than costs to their customers.
Data classified as secret should, as a rule, not be stored in public clouds but rather in intranets of the company. Confidential data can be stored in Public Clouds in an encrypted form or by use of access controls to the public cloud folders
Hybrid cloud
A Hybrid Cloud integrates public cloud services, private cloud services and on-premises infrastructure and provides coordination, management and computer applications across the three environments to create a unified and flexible distributed computing environment to run its applications and information storage.
An example of a Hybrid Cloud is when an organization stores sensitive client data in-house on a private cloud application, but interconnect that application to a business intelligence application provided on a public cloud as a software service. This extends the capabilities of the enterprise to deliver a specific business service through the addition of externally available public cloud services. Hybrid cloud adoption depends on a number of factors such as data security and compliance requirements, level of control needed over data, and the applications an organization uses.
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Reasons for using cloud computing
- Shared resources significantly reduce the cost of buying and installing hardware
- The fact that services are provided through internet means data and information is available to users in different locations all the time
- It is easy to scale up the resources (e.g. compute, memory and storage) whenever required. You pay for only what you need at that time. This improves the scalability of business without spending too much human and physical resources and therefore improves on customer experience.
- You do not need to have every computing expert in your premises. Computing services are provided by specialized companies with the necessary expertise.