Intro to Cloud Computing
Intro to Cloud Computing
In simple laymans terms, Cloud Computing means a technique that allows you to store the data. Basically the Cloud refers to internet. Hence it can also be called the internet computing. But the precise definition will differ to some extent depending upon the factor that whether the end user is a customer or a business.
In case you are a business, many of the brand names like IBM, Amazon, and Google etc provide this service of cloud computing on internet. So rather than hiring software and hardware and administering the infrastructure for hosting a website on your own, the cloud computing technique offers you a feature of setting it up on some other infrastructure already into existence (like the brands stated above). Another notable advantage is that since you are not renting any hardware physically, so you can easily level up or down as per your need. This means you are paying only for all that you are using right now even if the load goes high all of a sudden or if it lowers again, as the whole host systems are not idle.
If you are a consumer, then the real idea is that you need not keep the information on your personal computer system as you can use the Cloud Computing service and keep your data stored on cloud (Internet). You can understand the advantage and beauty of this system simply by considering the situation like system break down. As your data is stored somewhere else so you can retrieve everything back on any other system by just connecting to the internet. Like various applications (e.g. Google Docs), enables you to create the documents (like spread sheet or a report may be) online. You don’t have to worry even if your system is burnt to ashes. Just connect to internet and your document will be stored safely on the application server you used. Other benefit of this service is easy sharing of the documents with people located at geographically different places. They can be invited to team up with you and edit or view the document in real time and once the job is finished, the document can be published as a web page and made available to anyone around the globe.
So what is the exact importance of this cloud computing service? For small to big companies, a major challenge can be ensuring the security of data as well as maintaining the back up so that nothing will be lost in almost any circumstance. Now the cloud computing enables you to put this entire burden off your shoulders and on someone else, by positioning the data on a storage engine. Here you depend on others to secure your information. While the bigger businesses can afford similar superlative infrastructure, which is not possible for the owners of small companies (as they cannot meet the expenses of such a high level of network and hardware), this indeed is a good deal. And also it allows multiple people to collaborate at same time dynamically to edit a similar document which is not possible otherwise, if you plan on having a server.
