What is Cloud Computing?

The term cloud refers to a network or the internet. It is a technology that uses remote servers on
the internet to store, manage, and access data online rather than local drives. The data can be
anything such as files, images, documents, audio, video, and more.

Definition: Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computing resources as services

over the internet. It eliminates the need for enterprises to procure, configure, or manage
resources themselves, and they only pay for what they use.

There are the following operations that we can do using cloud computing:
 Developing new applications and services
 Storage, back up, and recovery of data
 Hosting blogs and websites
 Delivery of software on demand
 Analysis of data
 Streaming videos and audios

Why Cloud Computing?

Cloud computing is important for several reasons. It is cost-effective, scalable, flexible and
accessible. It provides automatic software updates, speed and efficiency, data security, improved
disaster recovery, advanced analytics and machine learning.

Cloud computing forms the foundation for many digital business initiatives and a solid cloud
strategy helps maximize the value of your cloud investments. With worldwide “whole cloud”
spending predicted to reach $565B by 2021, it’s never been more vital that businesses understand
and fully embrace the possibilities this tech can unlock.

Small as well as large IT companies, follow the traditional methods to provide the IT
infrastructure. That means for any IT company, we need a Server Room that is the basic need
of IT companies.

In that server room, there should be a database server, mail server, networking, firewalls, routers,
modem, switches, QPS (Query Per Second means how much queries or load will be handled by
the server), configurable system, high net speed, and the maintenance engineers.
Figure: Business Scenario Before Cloud Computing and After Cloud Computing.

To establish such IT infrastructure, we need to spend lots of money. To overcome all these
problems and to reduce the IT infrastructure cost, Cloud Computing comes into existence. In
different cloud architecture the service provider takes responsibilities to provide different
services an IT company needs. The IT company has to pay comparatively very less amount as
the services are rented to the company. Even using cloud computing with only minimum
configuration desktop computer and internet connection an IT company can be setup with no
time.
Figure: Different Cloud Services.
How Cloud Computing works?
Practical Scenario-Assume that you are an executive at a very big corporation. Your particular
responsibilities include to make sure that all of your employees have the right hardware and
software they need to do their jobs. To buy computers for everyone is not enough. You also have
to purchase software as well as software licenses and then provide these softwares to your
employees as they require. Whenever you hire a new employee, you need to buy more software
or make sure your current software license allows another user. It is so stressful that you have to
spend lots of money.

But, there may be an alternative for executives like you. So, instead of installing a suite of
software for each computer, you just need to load one application. That application will allow the
employees to log-in into a Web-based service which hosts all the programs for the user that is
required for his/her job. Remote servers owned by another company and that will run everything
from e-mail to word processing to complex data analysis programs. It is called cloud computing,
and it could change the entire computer industry.

In a cloud computing system, there is a significant workload shift. Local computers have no
longer to do all the heavy lifting when it comes to run applications. But cloud computing can
handle that much heavy load easily and automatically. Hardware and software demands on the
user's side decrease. The only thing the user's computer requires to be able to run is the cloud
computing interface software of the system, which can be as simple as a Web browser and the
cloud's network takes care of the rest.

Cloud computing works by having companies host or maintain massive data centers that provide
the security, storage capacity and computing power to support cloud infrastructure. Clients pay
for the rights to use their clouds along with an ecosystem to communicate between devices and
programs.

Cloud computing technology is based on virtualization. Virtualization allows the possibility of

having multiple virtual machines, each essentially running a separate operating system and
applications installed on one physical server.

Cloud computing provides a virtual environment for the users to store the data on the cloud and
can access that data remotely from any location. The services are operable in case of hardware
failure or any other server issues.
Figure: How Cloud Works.
Characteristics of Cloud Computing

The characteristics of cloud computing are given below:

1) Agility

The cloud works in a distributed computing environment. It shares resources among users

and works very fast.

2) High availability and reliability

The availability of servers is high and more reliable because the chances of infrastructure
failure are minimum.

3) High Scalability

Cloud offers "on-demand" provisioning of resources on a large scale, without having

engineers for peak loads.
4) Multi-Sharing

With the help of cloud computing, multiple users and applications can work more
efficiently with cost reductions by sharing common infrastructure.

5) Device and Location Independence

Cloud computing enables the users to access systems using a web browser regardless of their
location or what device they use e.g. PC, mobile phone, etc. As infrastructure is off-
site (typically provided by a third-party) and accessed via the Internet, users can connect
from anywhere.

6) Maintenance

Maintenance of cloud computing applications is easier, since they do not need to be installed
on each user's computer and can be accessed from different places. So, it reduces the cost
also.

7) Low Cost

By using cloud computing, the cost will be reduced because to take the services of cloud
computing, IT company need not to set its own infrastructure and pay-as-per usage of
resources.

8) Services in the pay-per-use mode

Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are provided to the users so that they can access
services on the cloud by using these APIs and pay the charges as per the usage of services.

Advantages of Cloud Computing

As we all know that Cloud computing is trending technology. Almost every company switched
their services on the cloud to rise the company growth.

Here, we are going to discuss some important advantages of Cloud Computing-

Figure: Advantages of Cloud Computing.
1) Back-up and restore data
Once the data is stored in the cloud, it is easier to get back-up and restore that data using the
cloud.

2) Improved collaboration
Cloud applications improve collaboration by allowing groups of people to quickly and easily
share information in the cloud via shared storage.

3) Excellent accessibility
Cloud allows us to quickly and easily access store information anywhere, anytime in the whole
world, using an internet connection. An internet cloud infrastructure increases organization
productivity and efficiency by ensuring that our data is always accessible.

4) Low maintenance cost

Cloud computing reduces both hardware and software maintenance costs for organizations.

5) Mobility
Cloud computing allows us to easily access all cloud data via mobile.
6) Services in the pay-per-use model
Cloud computing offers Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to the users for access
services on the cloud and pays the charges as per the usage of service.

7) Unlimited storage capacity

Cloud offers us a huge amount of storing capacity for storing our important data such as
documents, images, audio, video, etc. in one place.

8) Data security
Data security is one of the biggest advantages of cloud computing. Cloud offers many advanced
features related to security and ensures that data is securely stored and handled.

Disadvantages of Cloud Computing

A list of the disadvantage of cloud computing is given below –

1) Internet Connectivity
As you know, in cloud computing, every data (image, audio, video, etc.) is stored on the cloud,
and we access these data through the cloud by using the internet connection. If you do not have
good internet connectivity, you cannot access these data. However, we have no any other way to
access data from the cloud.

2) Vendor lock-in
Vendor lock-in is the biggest disadvantage of cloud computing. Organizations may face
problems when transferring their services from one vendor to another. As different vendors
provide different platforms, that can cause difficulty moving from one cloud to another.

3) Limited Control
As we know, cloud infrastructure is completely owned, managed, and monitored by the service
provider, so the cloud users have less control over the function and execution of services within a
cloud infrastructure.

4) Security
Although cloud service providers implement the best security standards to store important
information. But, before adopting cloud technology, you should be aware that you will be
sending all your organization's sensitive information to a third party, i.e., a cloud computing
service provider. While sending the data on the cloud, there may be a chance that your
organization's information is hacked by Hackers.