#cloud software services

Computing services delivery over internet to offer faster innovation, flexible recourses and economies of scale is called Cloud computing. Eric Schmidt is the first person who coined the word of cloud computing in 2006. There are 3 types of Cloud computing:-

Infrastructure as a service [IaaS]

Platform as a service [Paas]

Cloud computing and its developers are capitalizing on surging demand. The best part is that it has helped many businesses too to cut down on costs. Cloud computing is focuses on a category of computing solutions in which users get complete or partial access to the different computing resources depending on demand and as needed. The resources can be physical or virtual and also available on a dedicated or shared basis. The cloud computing resources are not dependent on the way of access but mostly characterized by self-service interfaces. The resources are acquired as and when needed by businesses. Cloud is also termed as a concept which defines an approach.

Cloud developers are dedicated to provide IT services which take advantage of growing power of virtual servers. The importance of cloud development has been mostly in the form of cost savings in infrastructure investment. Developers save an ample amount of time in application development as well as deployment on cloud servers and thus resource allocation overheads are reduced to a great extent. A public (external) cloud is a perfect environment which exists beyond the regular company's firewall. It is a service which is offered by many huge third-party vendors.

Clouds are sometimes shared or multi-tenanted and managed by a company which hosts a self-service portal. The delivery models of public clouds are replicated in private clouds for the specific benefit of an organization as well its internal employees and customers. The interface manages it wholly. The hybrid cloud environment includes external services which are used for extending an internal cloud.

Many people consider Software as a Service (SaaS) as an integral subset of cloud computing which is also applicable to IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service which remotely access server/storage capacity) and PaaS (Platform as a Service which lets developers to build and deploy apps on the hosted platform). There are various cloud groups which are communities which work towards streamlining various services for quick development and deployment associated with the cloud. Bookmarks which are set on the browser work on having a systematic listing of cloud services which can be useful for the company like libraries of resources.

There are many types of applications which can be run on the cloud. Not everything should run in a cloud although it could. Software which have beneficial attributes for the users can find a place on the cloud and some of the information should be better be local since they might mean of critical importance to the company and the users on a local basis. Additionally, it would mean security of information if it is local. Sensitive user data should never be on the cloud since it affects privacy rights. A cloud is the perfect for applications which deal with different types of resources related to IT management, productivity or capacity (server and/or storage).

Social networking sites and collaboration sites are also mostly used in the cloud and serve to be perfect for a wide range of users. Software as a service (SaaS) revolves around applications which are centrally hosted and in recent years there are many business applications which are being deployed using SaaS as the common delivery model. Many businesses prefer the model owing it its simplified deployment process and cost effectiveness.

Cloud developers are in huge demand for deploying web apps on the cloud as well developing new apps. Customized web services are also in great demand too.

Cloud computing is just any application, infrastructure, or even a platform which is provided for many users via the internet.

With the proliferation of devices via the internet, many providers came up with an idea to keep information in a centralized location? The centralization has allowed the users to optimally use the “public utility” of the web for access to their own resources. Certain benefits can be associated with centralized resources including cost efficiencies and an enhanced customer experience.

But what does that mean to me?

The typical internet-savvy consumer has always been using the cloud since many years but never could associate the word cloud with its experience. One would order goods from Amazon.com from years now which was actually a transaction occurring in the cloud.

Hence most consumer-facing businesses have already tried using cloud computing for their business needs. There have been millions of transactions on a business-to-business (B2B) scale going around the cloud. The consumers need to repose faith in the cloud which encourages more activity.

It does not matter at all if the data center infrastructure is part of a wider cloud offering or even the main focus, but there are other factors involved in a successful cloud business. No cloud platform, which is usually offered to users, can ignore high-performance and scalability coupled with low-cost data storage. A customer's data is its core point, and data safety is the most important part of a successful cloud. At the same time, it is also important that the cloud service is an efficient, well-managed, and extremely flexible data center in its development as well as its delivery.

Cloud computing is the single-most hottest trending word in the IT industry. The drastic changes in the cloud world have impacted larger companies to launch their hybrid along with public clouds. Now even the telecommunication giants have got hold of the computing arena and aspiring for the top.

Recently, the $1.8 billion deal of telecom giant Verizon which involved the buyout of Terremark is known the world over as one of the ground-breaking deals of the decade as well as the cloud computing history.

Terremark has now launched its Enterprise Private Cloudwhich basks in single-tenant facility and also provides enterprise-class security and scalability to all its users. It is important for the telecom giant to continue innovation to thwart competition from other telco giants like Savvis, or even Tata Communications since competition is expected to brew strongly this year. The competition in the arena for cloud space is increasing with time.

Meanwhile Microsoft, the software giant based in Redmond, Washington, US has continued with cloud at the center as evident in its showcase of services in the WPC event. It has strived to manufacture, license, and support a plethora of cloud products as well as mobile services. With its user-friendly Metro UI, the companies is expected to launch Windows 8 amidst much fanfare and huge expectations from analysts, the world over.

Rackspace Hosting has been in the enterprise-level IT and cloud computing hosting market since nearly a decade now. The company has managed to bring data centers, networks and even hardware devices together. It has a competent set of web hosting services and provides cloud applications too.

Cloud computing has ruled our lives in the IT world since a decade. But it is going to be much more than that in the future, say analysts.

First, the Cloud Computing is expected to be computing in the real sense of term in the future. The cloud is sure to engulf the IT world soon till the point of time that everything related to IT will be connected to the cloud. Computing will soon be the word that will be of any importance. The data centers are part of the private cloud which have privacy and critical information not meant for unauthorized eyes. It is evident that soon, since everything will be on the cloud, the term “cloud” will lose importance. Everything will be connected to everything else. The Internet will be a bigger network, so to say.

Secondly, the cloud computing concept is about fit and function and not about just buzzwords. The hype is not dead yet and most of the IT world is driven by hype that cloud computing is the next thing and the future without realizing that they themselves are caught in a cloud of network everywhere. There is actual thinking about the Cloud Computing technology driving it. The business value is important there and the right fit will soon be ready after some failures in a few years. One needs to get better and better to use the cloud as a means of better ROI and productivity.

It is possible since security is one of the biggest deterrents of cloud computing, the aspect will be managed by a centralized trust. One will learn soon to manage once own identity in a cloud. There might be some sites which will validate identities and it is also possible that we might need a single sign-on as a requirement for verification in the online world.

Centralized data will soon prove to be advantageous. There would be huge data stores that would be accessible through a public API which is like watching over real time stock market behavior. Big data technology might be the future here; the most sensational being Hadoop, which will reach sizes which will never be heard in today’s world.

Mobile devices are expected to be extremely powerful and thinner, since everything in mobile computing has revolutionized IT. The reliance of clouds will grow within mobile applications and the mobile devices will have many more capabilities than what it has now. The data is expected to be stored in the cloud.

Cloud computing services will get everyone to play the service provider. There is no limiting factor to this but focus will be diverted to application and business services. Employees will be able to access their company details after authentication through any device and can also transact and manage their work.

A big security breach might prompt companies to sort out the security issue. There will be a new real time, personalized service providers who will use big data, social media and mobility to the advantage of all. The convergence of social media, mobile and cloud is going to be a crucial factor in the future since governments would need technology to deliver services and even drive the economy in a big way.

The cloud has proved to be of much value to the IT industry. However, most analysts are of the opinion that it can be a double-edged sword too.

The cloud ranges from the on-demand availability of enterprise-class infrastructure through IaaS, SaaS and PaaS. Writing applications for the cloud is not as easy as it seems and requires sophisticated control and knowledge about traditional application architectures. Some aspects of programming which made sense before the cloud era now do not make sense. There are a few programming problems in the cloud which, if not understood well, might lead to disastrous results.

The cloud application development is public in nature and enterprises are adopting semantics privately for more storage and applications to be consumed by internal users of an organization. One must have a robust framework in place for an internal and external cloud. One can avoid cloud blunders for providing a strong foundation for all those involved in managing cloud applications. Use of traditional application architectures: Traditional application architectures are incompatible with the cloud. The cloud can be used to host them and even inherit the qualities of deployment and management value. There is fantastic elastic capacity in the cloud. To create apps for the cloud, it is essential that pre-cloud application architectures are arranged with fixed servers and a tough configuration. It is important to leverage a dynamic infrastructure environment and high availability.

Most cloud platforms are shared in nature and virtual. They might lack reliability sometimes. Traditional development practices come with more rigidity in their approach and expectations and hence it is not feasible for working around them. Excessive costing involved due incorrect architecture decisions: In the development of non-cloud applications, if the written code is inefficient and the architectural patterns denote a costly infrastructure, customers would have to spend much more. While developing for the cloud,one needs to be responsible for operating the cloud application for customers.

Inefficiency is a strict no-no since it will have a direct impact on the overall costing. A number of companies have cloud business which is worth hundreds of millions due to the right architectural decisions which included cloud as a single instance, multi-tenancy architecture. The cloud is not inherently cheaper than any of the traditional datacenters but the overall flexibility as well as the pricing structure uses innovation to be cost-effective. Relies on human sense rather than automated workflows:

Cloud apps allows one to tap into incredible flexibility. But the flexibility is extended to human sense as in the real world but that does not make any sense in a virtual world. All fundamental operating workflows including provisioning new business units, change of price-points and modifications of entitlements along with application upgrades need to be automated. Critical workflows of high importance need true interoperability. Manually driven operating work flows are sure to set up inefficient standards leaving the cloud's value on the table and increasing disadvantages. Ignorance of operational lock-in risk: Cloud offerings usually consist of a holistic stack.

The APIs and infrastructure patterns follow a certain route and adequate attention needs to be paid to lock-in risk. Making an R&D decision about the cloud stack to use is quite different to operating and hosting environment. One can also choose between public or private cloud computing technology in different approaches. But the lock-in risk needs to be taken care of.