Could anyone rely on the clouds some years ago? And nowadays we have an innovation that can save much time and lots of money.
The term “Cloud” was first borrowed from telephony. Telephone companies were able to offer Virtual Private Network (VPN) based services with the same guaranteed bandwidth as fixed circuits at a lower cost because they could switch traffic to balance utilization as they saw fit, thus utilizing their overall network bandwidth more effectively. The term “telecom cloud” was used to describe this type of networking, and cloud computing is conceptually somewhat similar.
The concept of cloud computing dates back to 1960 when John McCarthy said that “computation may someday be organized as a public utility”. The term cloud had already come into commercial use in the early 1990 and in 1995 General Magic launched a short-lived cloud computing product. By the turn of the 21st century, the term “cloud computing” began to appear more widely and nowadays it includes three categories such as: Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).
A cloud service has three distinct characteristics that differentiate it from traditional hosting. It is sold on demand, typically by the minute or the hour; it is elastic – a user can have as much or as little of a service as they want at any given time; and the service is fully managed by the provider.
A cloud can be private or public. A public cloud sells services to anyone on the Internet. A private cloud is a proprietary network or a data center that supplies hosted services to a limited number of people. When a service provider uses public cloud resources to create their private cloud, the result is called a virtual private cloud. Anyway the goal of cloud computing is to provide easy, scalable access to computing resources and IT services. The majority of cloud computing infrastructure consists of reliable services delivered through data centers and built on servers with different levels of virtualization technologies. The services are accessible anywhere that provides access to networking infrastructure.
Cloud computing customers do not generally own the physical infrastructure serving as host to the software platform in question. They consume resources as a service and pay only for what they really use.
Cloud computing is criticized for limiting the freedom of users and making them dependent on the cloud computing provider. Even if data are securely stored in a cloud, many factors can temporarily disrupt access to the data, such as network outages, denial of service attacks against the service provider, and a major failure of the service provider infrastructure.
In spite of the fact that cloud computing limits the freedom of users and makes them dependent on the cloud computing provider, it still remains a reliable service accessible anywhere that provides access to networking infrastructure.
Kristina Frangulyan is a Marketing Specialist at Monitis Inc., a leading websites, network monitoring service provider from the cloud.
