CLOUD COMPUTING In the simplest terms, cloud computing means storing and accessing data and programs over the Internet instead of your computer's hard drive. The cloud is just a metaphor for the Internet. It goes back to the days of flowcharts and presentations that would represent the gigantic infrastructure of the Internet as nothing but a puffy, white cloud, accepting connections and doling out information as it floats. What cloud computing is not about is your hard drive. When you store data on--or run programs from the hard drive, that's called local storage and computing. Everything you need is physically close to you, which means accessing your data is fast and easy (for that one computer, or others on the local network). Working off your hard drive is how the computer industry functioned for decades. The cloud is also not about having a dedicated hardware server in residence. Storing data on a home or office network does not count as utilizing the cloud. For it to be considered "cloud computing," you need to access your data or your programs over the Internet, or at the very least, have that data synchronized with other information over the Net. As an individual user, you may never have any idea what kind of massive data-processing is happening on the other end. In the enterprise, cloud computing allows a company to pay for only as much capacity as is needed, and bring more online as soon as required. Because this pay-for-what-you-use model resembles the way electricity, fuel and water are consumed, it's sometimes referred to as utility computing. Cloud Deployment Models A cloud can be private or public. Private or public, the goal of cloud computing is to provide easy, scalable access to computing resources and IT services. A public cloud sells services to anyone on the Internet. The cloud infrastructure is made available to the general public or a large industry group and is owned by an organization that sells cloud services. Cloud computing providers like Amazon, Google, and Rackspace rent out services to other organizations, which in turn may provide services to the (sometimes millions of) customers. (Currently, Amazon Web Services is the largest public cloud provider). The Amazon AWS infrastructure is reported to carry as much as 1% of the all internet consumer traffic in North America and on an average a third of all internet users visit an AWS powered site daily. Amazon reports having customers like Dropbox, Zynga, Reddit, MySpace, Netflix, Ericssons, European Space Agency, IBM, Newsweek, PBS, Yelp, FourSquare,, The Guardian, Farmville, to name a few.
A private cloud is a proprietary cloud infrastructure that is operated solely for a specific company. It may be managed by the company or a third party. This is the most secure of all cloud options. Cloud Service models Cloud computing services are broadly divided into three categories: Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). In the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) model, cloud service providers like Amazon Web Services provides businesses with capabilities to access and configure their virtual servers and storage. Rather than purchasing servers, software, data center space or network equipment, this cloud model allows businesses to rent those resources as a fully outsourced service. In the Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) cloud model, the cloud service provider offers a complete platform for application, interface, and database development, storage, and testing. This allows businesses to streamline the development, maintenance and support of custom applications, lowering IT costs and minimizing the need for hardware, software, and hosting environments. In the software-as-a-service (SaaS) cloud model, a cloud service provider supplies the hardware infrastructure, houses the business software and related data, and users access the software and data via their web browser. SaaS is a very broad market. Services delivered this way include Webbased email, inventory control, accounting, customer relationship management, enterprise resource planning, invoicing, human resource management, content management, and service desk management. Cloud computing and the individual The lines between local computing and cloud computing sometimes get very blurry. That's because the cloud is part of almost everything on our computers these days. Common Cloud Examples:
Microsoft SkyDrive is free cloud storage for your files that you can access from anywhere, without taking up all of the space on your PC. You can use it on your Windows 8 PC. You can also download the Skydrive app on your iphone or ipad, Android, or Windows Phone. With SkyDrive and Office 2013, you can access and work on your Word, Excel, and other Office documents from your SkyDrive. You can also access, work on, and share Office docs in SkyDrive.com right in your browser with free Office Web Apps. Google Drive is a pure cloud computing service, with all the apps and storage online. Google Drive is available on desktop computers, tablets and smartphones. In fact, all of Google's services could be considered cloud computing: Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Reader, Google Voice. Apple icloud service is used for online storage and synchronization of your mail, contacts, calendar, media files and documents. Services like Dropbox also work in the cloud. They store a synched version of your files online, but also sync those files with local storage. Synchronization to allow all your devices to access the same data is a cornerstone of the cloud computing experience, even if you do access the file locally. When you add a file to your computer's Dropbox, the file is synced with Dropbox servers. Dropbox will then initiate the syncing process as soon as it determines a change has been made to the file. A device that is completely cloud-centric is the Samsung Chromebook Series 3, an inexpensive laptop (starting at $249) that has just enough local storage and power to let it run a Web browser, specifically Google Chrome. From there, most everything you do is online: apps, media, and storage are all in the cloud. Of course, one of the biggest problems about devices like Chromebook is if you're somewhere without an Internet connection and you need to access your data. Cloud computing in Business Cloud computing is expected to be one of the fastest-growing technologies in the coming years. Business applications will be the largest market for cloud services spending, especially for general business applications like customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP). A cloud service has three distinct characteristics that differentiate it from traditional hosting. It is sold on demand; it is elastic -- a user can have as much or as little of a service as they want at any given time;
and the service is fully managed by the provider (the consumer needs nothing but a personal computer and Internet access). The datacentres used for cloud computing are very large. Following are examples of public cloud providers: It is estimated that the Amazon EC2 is powered by half a million servers, over 50,000 of which are hosted in the Dublin datacenter. The new Facebook server farm in the US state of Oregon measures 14,000 square meters and cost around 200 million US dollars to build. Cloud computing can offer organizations a number of advantages, including: Cost savings and Usage-based billing Elasticity Business continuity Business agility Green IT Cost Savings and Usage-based Billing With cloud computing, financial institutions can turn a large up-front capital expenditure into a smaller, ongoing operational cost. There is no need for heavy investments in new hardware and software. In addition, the unique nature of cloud computing allows financial institutions to pick and choose the services required on a pay-as-you-go basis. Elasticity Elasticity is a key benefit of cloud computing and this elasticity helps to cope with load and mitigates the risk of overload.. It is difficult to mitigate the impact of peak usage with limited computing resources. Business Continuity A key benefit of cloud computing is resilience in the face of regional power cuts or local natural disasters. It is difficult to mitigate the impact of fairly common regional disasters like floods, storms, or earthquakes in a set up with only a single datacenter, or a traditional set-up with a legacy onsite IT deployment. With cloud computing, the provider is responsible for managing the technology. Financial firms can gain a higher level of data protection, fault tolerance, and disaster recovery. Cloud computing also provides a high level of redundancy and back-up at lower price than traditional managed solutions.
Business Agility and Focus The flexibility of cloud-based operating models lets financial institutions experience shorter development cycles for new products. This supports a faster and more efficient response to the needs of banking customers. Since the cloud is available on-demand, less infrastructure investments are required, saving initial set-up time. Cloud computing allows businesses to focus more on the business of financial services, not IT. Green IT Organizations can use cloud computing to transfer their services to a virtual environment that reduces the energy consumption and carbon footprint that comes from setting up a physical infrastructure. It also leads to more efficient utilization of computing power and less idle time. Concentration of ICT resources Adoption of cloud computing implies a concentration of IT resources in very large datacenters. In information security, the concentration of IT resources is a double edged sword : On the one hand, large cloud providers can deploy state of the art security and business continuity measures and spread the associated costs across the customers. On the other hand, if an outage or a security breach occurs then the consequences could be big, affecting many citizens, many organizations, at once. To illustrate this paradox, we look at some past incidents: Resilience: The Japanese earthquake of 2011 showed how resilient cloud computing can be in the face of disaster and in the aftermath. Cloud services survived power outages by using emergency fuel and data connections over mobile networks and fixed networks held up. Traditional IT deployments in the disaster area on the other hand went offline. In the aftermath of the disaster, cloud service providers provided support for emergency services, and in the recovery phase cloud computing was used by organization to quickly get services up and running. Single point of failure: Lightning struck in the Dublin region in summer 2011 affecting the cloud services of some major cloud providers. The outage lasted 2 days and affected many of their customers. A cyber disruption in this context means (temporary or permanent) loss of service, with impact on users of the cloud service who rely on its continuity.