Cloud computing in the recent years is the most talked about technology among most of the executives, managers, analysts, and various IT professionals. Professionals at different levels need to understand the applications, benefits and implications/risks of joining the wave of cloud computing. Many big enterprises those were having their own leased data networks for distributed data processing or they owned/ shared data-centres and data warehouses have recognised the economics of cloud computing and joined the wave. Most of the Small to Medium Enterprises (SMEs)are progressively moving from in-house computing effort to cloud computing. However, while all of them are happy to reap the benefits of cost-saving and elasticity of easy scaling up/down their resources, yet they all remain very concerned about data security/ownership and migration from one to another service provider. Seeing the rapid spread of cloud computing in the business world, technical universities and engineering colleges are vigorously adopting cloud computing in their curriculum. It is therefore essential for all young professionals to have basic knowledge about cloud computing to appreciate its impact on their career.
What is Cloud Computing?
Cloud computing is an on-demand delivery of computing services like servers, data storage, databases, networking, application software, and analytics over the Internet (Cloud). Companies like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Yahoo offering these computing services are called public cloud providers and typically charge for cloud computing services based on their usage. This has brought big revolution in IT industry and business houses. Cloud Computing offers computing power like water supply or electricity where the user pays only for the resources used and for the duration of use. The user need not own expensive hardware and software to match the market requirements. This has impacted the data centres and data warehouses since the customer can now use both hardware and software resources on a need basis, with the full elasticity of expanding and contracting computing configuration at will. Your company doesn’t pay for hardware and maintenance of IT infrastructure. Instead, the service provider pays for equipment and maintenance and they charge you only for the resources you demand and the duration of their usage.
The old concept of in-house software development has paved the way for software application integration. This has also impacted ERP environment which so far was configured on an enterprise basis. Both big and small industries are rapidly adopting cloud computing environment. Cloud computing promises to cut operational and capital costs and, more importantly, let IT departments focus on their main projects.
Why it is called the cloud? Cloud computing has emerged out of earlier data centres which had few thousands of servers configured together to provide large computing capacity with a lot of redundancy. A number of the data centres were interlined based on distributed computing environment where computing job (load) could be processed on any data-centre and moved across data centres as per the overall operating mechanism( Algorithm ). Cloud computing is inter-linking many datacenters through the globally shared Internet, which is symbolically shown as a cloud. Hence Cloud computing gets its name as a metaphor for the Internet.
Cloud Components. A cloud computing solution is made up of several components like-
- Clients. Clients are the devices that the end users interact with to manage their Information in the cloud. Clients generally fall into three categories.
- Mobile devices. These include Tablets, PDAs or Smart-phones,iPhone
- Thin Clients. These are the computers those do not have internal hard drives, but rather let the server do all the work, and display the information. Thin clients are becoming an increasingly popular solution, because of their price, compact size and no risk of viral
- Thi ck Clients. These are Laptops or Desktop computers having disk drives and they use the web browser like Chrome, Firefox, or Internet Explorer ( edge) to connect to the cloud.
- Data-center. The data centre is the mainstay of cloud computing. It is the collection of servers where your application is housed and run without any dedicated server for you. A small data centre could be a large room in the basement of your building while large data centre may have rooms over many stories to accommodate a very large number ( 20K to 60K) of servers. This will require a huge amount of power for running the servers and air-conditioning to keep this server under controlled temperature. Lately, Microsoft to cut down electricity load for air-conditioning has located one of its large data-centre under the sea on the coast of England.
- Virtualisation. This is software implementation allowing multiple instances of virtual servers to be used. In this, you can have to say 10 virtual servers running on one physical server. This has brought down operating cost and given more benefits to the customers.
- Distributed Data-centres (Servers).In this environment, servers are in geographically dispersed locations. However, to the cloud subscriber, these servers act as if they're co-located and operating next to each other. This gives the service provider more flexibility in options and resilience against an outage. For instance, Google, Amazon has their cloud servers located all over the world. If something were to happen at one site, causing a failure, the services would still be accessed through another data centre
Cloud Computing services. The term services in cloud computing are the concept of being able to use reusable computing resources. There are broadly three types of services -
- Software as a Service (SaaS). SaaS is a method for delivering software applications over the Internet, on demand and typically on a subscription basis. With SaaS, cloud providers host and manage the software application and related infrastructure and handle any maintenance, like software upgrades and security patching. Users connect to the application over the Internet, usually with a web browser on their Smartphone, Tablet, Laptop or PC. When the software is hosted off-site, the customer doesn't have to maintain it or support it. The idea is that you use the software out-of-the-box as is and do not need to make many changes or require integration with other systems. Typically, software that performs a simple task without much need to interact with other systems is more suited for SaaS. Customers who are not involved with software development but have need of high-powered applications can also benefit from SaaS. Some of these applications include – CRM, Video Conferencing, Accounting, web content management, Web Analytics.
- Platform as a Service (PaaS). PaaS refers to cloud computing services that supply an on-demand environment for developing, testing, delivering and managing software applications. It supplies all the resources required completely from the Internet, without the customer having to download or install any software. PaaS is designed to make it easier for developers to quickly create web or mobile apps, without worrying about setting up or managing the underlying infrastructure of servers, storage, network and databases needed for the development. PaaS caters for the application design, development, testing, deployment, and hosting on the cloud. Other services include team collaboration, web service integration, database integration, security, scalability, storage, state management, and versioning. However, PaaS suffers from a lack of interoperability and portability among cloud providers. That is, if you create an application with one cloud provider and later decide to move to another cloud service provider, you may not be able to do so—or you’ll have to pay a high price. Also, if the provider goes out of business, your applications and your data will be lost. PaaS is normally based on HTML or JavaScript and supports web development interfaces such as Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) and Representational State Transfer (REST), which allow the construction of multiple web services. The interfaces are also able to access databases and reuse services that are within a private network.
- Hardware as a Service(HaaS). Hardware as a Service (HaaS) is the next form of service available in cloud computing. Unlike SaaS and PaaS which are providing applications to customers, HaaS offers only the hardware so that customer can install whatever they want onto it. HaaS allows cloud service providers to rent its hardware resources to the customer so that they do not have to purchase servers, software, racks, and having to pay for the data-centre. HaaS allows the customer to rent such resources like server space, network equipment, Memory, CPU cycles, Storage space/Additionally, the infrastructure can be dynamically scaled up or down, based on the application resource needs. Resources are billed based on a utility computing basis.
- Database Services. Another “as a service” offering that is becoming prevalent in the world of cloud computing Database as a Service (DaaS). The idea behind DaaS is to avoid the complexity and cost of running your own database
Cloud Computing Models. In general, there are three models:-
• Public Clouds. This is a common pool of computing resources like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google, Rack – space, IBM’s Blue seal, Microsoft’s Azure.
• Private Clouds. This belongs to big enterprises that have full control of data location and its security.
• Hybrid Clouds. This is a judicious mix of the public and private cloud.
Benefits of Cloud Computing. Cloud computing is a big shift from the traditional way businesses thinking about owning in-house IT resources to having dynamically scalable shared computing resources with very high availability and at optimum cost. Major advantages of cloud computing are:
- Cost. Cloud computing eliminates the capital expense of buying hardware and software and setting up and running on-site data centres. It also takes care of round-the-clock IT experts for managing the infrastructure and supply of the electricity for power and cooling,
- Speed in configuring. Most cloud computing services are provided for self-service and on demand. A large vast amount of computing resources can be provisioned in minutes, typically with just a few mouse clicks, giving businesses a lot of flexibility and taking the pressure off capacity planning.
- Global Scale (Elastically). The benefits of cloud computing services include the ability to easily scale up or down. It means delivering the right amount of IT resources, computing power, storage and bandwidth when it’s needed and from any geographic location.
- Productivity of IT Team. Most data centres typically require a lot of “racking and stacking” hardware set up, software patching and other time-consuming IT management chores. Cloud computing removes the need for many of these tasks so that IT teams can spend time on achieving more important business goals.
- Performance. The biggest cloud computing services run on a worldwide network of secure data centres, which are regularly upgraded to the latest generation of fast and efficient computing hardware. This offers several benefits over a single corporate data centre, including reduced network latency for applications and greater economies of scale.
- Reliability. Cloud computing makes automatically data backup and disaster recovery. This makes business continuity easier and less expensive because This makes business continuity easier and less expensive because data can be mirrored at multiple redundant sites on the cloud provider’s network.
- Shorter Learning Curve Most workers have access to a computer and know how to use it on the World Wide Web. As such, the learning curve for using external applications can be much smaller.
- Smaller IT staff. IT systems require the overhead of salaries, perks/benefits, insurance, and building space for the staff. The ability of SaaS to farm out applications reduces the need for any large IT staff.
- Easy Customization. Earlier applications were difficult to customize and required Modification of the application code. SaaS applications are much easier to customize and it can provide the customers with exactly what they want.
- Better marketing reach. Earlier an IT solution provider, who had developed an application for a very narrow market, might have had problems marketing that application. However, with SaaS, the entire world is open to the providers.
- Security. Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) is widely used and trusted. This allows customers to reach their applications securely without having to employ complex back-end configurations, like virtual private networks (VPNs).
Problems and issues of cloud computing. Like any other IT environment, there can be some outages which can restrict various services and restrict operations. Some risks associated with cloud computing are:
• Internet that can be prone to outages and you can have problems accessing till the problem is fixed by the tech team of the service provider.
• If you have sensitive or proprietary information, your organisation may simply mandate that you not store it on someone else’s machines
• Integration issues. If one application of the customer is running under their own control and other is on the cloud, their integration at times become tricky.
• SaaS related Issues. In some cases, during the implementation stage, SaaS is unable to meet a very specific computational need. This forces the customer to buy the required software and install it on their local machines.
• “lock-in” with vendors. At times you get “lock-in” with vendors and may be unable to port that application to a new vendor. Even if it is possible to move to a new vendor, the old vendor might charge a huge moving out fee.
• Open Source Challenge. SaaS also faces challenges from the availability of open source applications and cheaper hardware. Some customer can put their open source applications on hardware that performs better and cost lesser.
Cloud computing isn’t a one-size-fits-all affair. The infrastructure will depend on the application and how the cloud provider has chosen to build the cloud solution. You may suddenly require a large number of servers for certain duration to meet a very large business requirement and you can not afford such a budget to acquire dedicated resources. Alternatively, due to business constraints, you may like to scale down your processing power, for some time. The cloud fits both the scenarios.
Dr Sarbjit Singh
Former Executive Director,
Apeejay College of Engineering. Gurgaon, India
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