You may have heard of the cloud and you may want to start adopting this concept for your network.
There are many implementations of the cloud for organizations Public Cloud, Private Cloud, Community cloud, Hybrid cloud.
this article will hopefully help you choose which solution is for you
First of all, what is the “Cloud” the cloud is a term for software/hardware that is hosted totally or partially by another company example of this is Amazon web services (AWS) or Microsoft Azure.
As companies started growing the networks start becoming more complex and costly to run the boom started with virtualization companies had many servers, switches, routers and other equipment that would not be completely utilized.
Imagine you had 50 servers that are running at 20% each there is a lot of wasted resources also think of the cost of the equipment not even being used so we created virtualization this allowed us to trim down on equipment and use the resources more efficiently.
But then organizations started pushing to trim down even more and make resources more available why should I pay for equipment I need for a short time? think of developers they need to test an app and for a short time need 10GB of Ram with cloud solutions at the click of a button I can get those resources and pay for those resources.The old way I would need to purchase the memory even though I only need it for a short time you can say this is a rental company for resources you pay for what you use. There are some variations of the types of cloud services there are
IAAS – Infrastructure As a Service
Infrastructure as a Service is a type of cloud service that allows the cloud consumer rent hardware related service such as CPU, RAM, Bandwith.
Think of this is renting a computer the responsibility of the provider is to maintain the hardware and the network to make the service available to the customer. The user is responsible for the operating system configuration and security of the operating system,
Example companies providing IAAS services are
Amazon web services
Microsoft Azure
PAAS
PAAS or Platform As a Service is mainly used for developers to deploy and create apps examples of a PAAS is the google apps engine.
This platform is used by developers via API’s to send requests for specific information or to perform a specific task and then the value is returned to the requesting app. Or a development environment where the developer selects the hardware and programming language to create their app.
SAAS
SAAS or Software As a Service is where a cloud provider is hosting an web application take for instance Office 365 which replaces the need for an exchange server. Consumers can buy these service like a commodity with little to not technical knowledge of how the service works. Other examples include GMAIL, HOTMAIL, SALESFORCE, Etc.
SAAS email solutions are where most businesses migrate to then of course Sales Force and other CRM solutions.
The cloud is the next frontier in I.T with huge potential I am excited to see where this takes us
no cloud for me – I just run a server off my computer where I can access all I need externally 🙂