Cloud Computing

Cloud Computing

Summary

Cloud computing can be public and/or private cloud computing. Each one of them has the following components:

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) where you basically rent/lease computer hardware such as
servers, PCs, networking and storage (SAN, NAS). Companies that offer IaaS are Rackspace, Amazon, Microsoft (Windows Azure - A very attractive offer)
Platform as a Service (PaaS) where you rent/lease Operating Systems, database server software, collaboration server software and development server software. Microsoft and Google are major players. Microsoft's Windows Azure offers SQL, Sharepoint and Visual Studio for application development.
Software as a Service (SaaS) where you rent/lease/subscribe to application software such accounting software, office software, email hosting, web conferencing, data storage management, VoIP, website and portal development tools, Content Management Systems (CMS), and many more. Microsoft offers the following SaaS services:

All the above MS services will be bundled in the upcoming MS Office 365 Service offering. Mid 2011 is the target period.

Because of the huge capital investment savings and substantial operational savings, companies are all trying to take advantage of cloud computing. You don't need to invest so much anymore in servers since you can rent them in the cloud. You don't need so many system and network administrators anymore to keep your servers up and running since you will have less servers. You don't need to pay so much for maintenance and upgrade licenses since all hardware and software is maintained and upgraded in the cloud at a much more economic cost.

SInce cloud computing is accessible from any device that has internet connection, and since mobility is becoming very fast the common mode of operating, cloud computing is becoming very much wanted.

There are still issues to be resolved. The main issues are integration, security and management of usage of cloud computing. For instance how will I integrate my service management application software (eg. ServiceCEO Office Edition) with MS Sharepoint Online and Quickbooks Online? These issues are being worked on as we speak.

Next we will describe some details of cloud computing and give you a real example of how a UK company is using cloud computing to the fullest.

Features

Cloud computing is running your computers and its applications in a remote or local datacenter.

If you use a public cloud, the data center is with a vendor that offers cloud computing. Cloud computing uses Software as a Service (SaaS) that runs on virtual machines that run on physical serveres in a data center. Since your SaaS application runs on a virtual machine, you can configure the sotware application for your specific needs. You can specify how much hard drive space, memory, and CPU time you need. You subscribe to a cloud computing service and pay for only the used resources and the time needed. This on the average is much cheaper than running your own hardware and software.

You could set up your cloud computing data center on your premises. This is called a private cloud.

The following demo explains cloud computing in very simple terms.

An UK Company using cloud company to the fullest can be accessed from here.

How We Can Help You

Internet Customer Solutions can help you as follows:

Analyze your requirements for cloud computing
Recommend which applications should be moved to a public cloud and which applications to keep in your current datacenter
Design and set up your private cloud based on MS Windows server 2008 R2, MS Windows Small Business Server 2008 R2, or on the Intel Hybrid Cloud solution
Train your people
Support your company

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