Cloud Computing is designed to provide on demand IT services ranging from storage, computation, networking utilization among other services and because of this diversity there is quite ambiguity among the general public. Cloud computing though is broad in general but it has been categorized based on the service offered.
- IaaS: Infrastructure as a Service which is sometime also know by Hardware as a Service (HaaS) is a way via which any company can self-provision a virtual instance composed of storage, server, networking and hardware components that can managed using a web based GUI. The hardware management is done by the provider and the consumer has the control of what application to deploy and run over the virtual instance that they owned.
- PaaS: Platform as a Service is a set of preconfigured set of Apps and APIs managed by the provider. It provides an on demand scalable run time environment to deploy and execute any application using the preconfigured vendor’s APIs and runtime environment.
- SaaS: This is a services model via which one can access application on demand. The application provider gives user a virtual instance of that application that is accessible over a network. SaaS provide a greater edge over SaaP(Software as a Product) as user need not worry about updates and patch management also the fact that application is now machine independent and can be accessed from anywhere without needing to download it. SaaS model is one of the hottest trends in cloud because of competitive advantage as well as reduced cost of ownership.
There are though some Common characteristics exhibits by all the cloud variants:
- On-demand: The user can configure and manage the cloud resources that fit their particular requirement by provisioning custom compute capabilities meeting specific needs.
- Resource Sharing: The provider gives share of the hardware infrastructures to its clients by way of dynamic resource assignment based on the consumer demand.
- Elasticity: The user can move from one virtual instance to thousand instances in minutes as the cloud is designed to meet consumer demand instantly.
Cloud infrastructure nowadays is basically served using three main distribution types designed to serve some specific purpose and market.
- Private cloud: This type of cloud is infrastructure is virtually owned by a single organization though the infrastructure necessary may not be managed by them and the location can be on premise or off premise.
- Community Cloud: In this the cloud computing resources are shared by a group with common goals and specifications. In this type too the data center may be on premise or off-premise and running operation may not necessarily be done by the organization itself.
- Public Cloud: This is the most famous variant of cloud where resource is managed by the vendor such as Amazon or Google and is allocated to end user as a service. This model is the most flexible and dynamic in nature since the end user can elastically change their requirement in real time and only pays for the resource consumed without long term contract.
- Hybrid Cloud: As the name suggest in this type of infrastructure computation is distributed across multiple platform. The hybrid infrastructure type can be a fusion of Public Cloud Infrastructure + (Private or community infrastructure) that are bound by similar technology for seamless computation and data transfer.
The cloud technology provides user with array of services and the end user needs to analysis before going for cloud adaptation as in some cases data exposure is not desirable for some company and hence not suitable for such organization to upload their sensitive information in cloud even though the data remain by default private and secure in public cloud.
About the author: James Mascarenhas works for Endpoint Vault that is specialized in providing enterprise online backup for the end user.
