Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is computing paradigm, in which numerous systems could be connected in private or public networks, for providing dynamically extendable infrastructure to application, data and file storage. With this technology, content storage, computation cost, delivery, and application hosting is reduced significantly. It is practical approach for experiencing direct benefits of cost and has potential in transforming data centre from capital-intensive set up to variable priced environment (Rittinghouse and Ransome 2017). Cloud computing’s idea is about primary principal of IT capabilities’ reusability. The difference which is brought by cloud computing compared to conventional concepts of computing, autonomic computing, grid computing or distributed computing is broadening horizons over the boundaries of the organisation.

            Cloud services could be categorised in three categories:

• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): This provides basic computing and storage capabilities as the systematized services on network Storage systems, servers, data centre, space and networking equipment are made accessible for handling workloads. Customer could deploy their own software within the infrastructure. 
• Platform as a Service (PaaS): Development environment or a software layer is offered as service, depending upon which service levels could be built. Customer could built applications of his own, which wold run on the infrastructure of the cloud provider. For meeting applications’ scalability and manageability, it provides limited combination of application servers and OS (Dinh et. al. 2013). 
• Software as a Service (SaaS): Customer is offered complete application in SaaS model. Service’s single instance run on cloud and services are provided to several end users. For the customer, no upfront investment is needed for software licenses or servers, therefore costs are reduced.

Third parties own and operate public clouds. Public cloud deliver scale’s superior economies to the customers, as costs of infrastructure are spread between several users, giving every client attractive low-cost. Public cloud’s one advantage is they might be larger when compared to enterprises cloud, providing ability for scaling seamlessly (Sadiku, Musa and Momoh 2014). Private clouds are developed for single enterprises. These clouds address concerns about security of data and greater control is offered by them, which is lacking in public cloud. 

Enterprises should be aligning their applications for exploiting architecture models which are offered by cloud computing. There are several reasons for attributing cloud technology having lower costs. Maintenance is lowered as infrastructure is not required to be purchased. With massive infrastructure which cloud providers offer today, maintenance and storage of huge data is made easy. 

Despite the growing influence of cloud computing, there are concerns about cloud computing. Crucial element which warrants scrutiny is data security. Organisations are reluctant in buying data security’s assurance of business from vendors. Loosing consumers’ data confidentiality and loosing data to rival organisations are the factors which are feared of (Arora, Parashar and Transforming 2013). All applications for businesses have agreements of service level which are followed stringently. 

Encryption helps in protecting data, so that the data is not compromised. It provides protection to data which is transferred along with data stores within the cloud. Encryption gives protection to data from unauthorised access and sensitive data is protected from data breaches with the help of this encryption. 

References

Arora, R., Parashar, A. and Transforming, C.C.I., 2013. Secure user data in cloud computing using encryption algorithms. International journal of engineering research and applications, 3(4), pp.1922-1926.

Dinh, H.T., Lee, C., Niyato, D. and Wang, P., 2013. A survey of mobile cloud computing: architecture, applications, and approaches. Wireless communications and mobile computing, 13(18), pp.1587-1611.

Rittinghouse, J.W. and Ransome, J.F., 2017. Cloud computing: implementation, management, and security. CRC press.

Sadiku, M.N., Musa, S.M. and Momoh, O.D., 2014. Cloud computing: opportunities and challenges. IEEE potentials, 33(1), pp.34-36.