Half a century ago, people could not imagine the state of technology today. There were predictions that a family does not need a computer at home, that it would never become portable due to its huge sizes that time and so on. However, computers have been getting smaller and smaller, their calculating power has been increasing each year, and various networks have been appearing and becoming more complicated. Even the processors of the modern smartphones became faster than any computer at the end of 2000’s. People seem to have everything possible in terms of digital technology, but the amount of data is constantly growing, it increases the demands in calculating speed and power appropriately. Thus, specialists invent more advanced technologies to satisfy the needs of today’s computer users. One of such inventions is cloud computing. The following
case brief issue example investigates the characteristics of this technology, analyzes its abilities and users together with predicting their possible future applications.
History of the Technology
Firstly, one should consider the historic aspect of the technology. The term cloud computing refers to the IT concept that describes the existence of a certain pool of data, services and resources, which can be used worldwide disregarding the location of the client’s computer and requiring minimum time and efforts from the provider. The described pool is extremely flexible, it can decrease or increase on demand of the user, satisfying its needs in storage and computing. Being an advanced technology, it provides people with a flexible and powerful amount of services staying one of the most hyped subjects in IT, but it is becoming more and more an integral concept in IT overall.
The first concept of virtual shared resources evolved in 1950’s, when the computers of that time could be used for communication but could not share the processing power. Nevertheless, in several years computers could share calculating power either, which stimulated great investment returns due to its usefulness. The technology was named “time-sharing” as it used the computer mainframes’ free time for solving the tasks of another user. In 2000’s the term “cloud” appeared to substitute the shared resources mentioned above, but the significant shift towards the wide spread of the technology is connected with Amazon. The technology has been called Elastic Compute Cloud and makes possible unlimited use of computer resources in the cloud. The launch of Google Apps in 2009 is marked as a breaking point for the software to be available as a cloud service. Since then, the cloud computing technology has developed into different models focusing on different aspects that users need.
The current technology of cloud computing also has similar concepts, such as grid, mainframe, utility computing and peer-to-peer. Each one of these concepts differs in terms of organizational structure, the need for central coordination and so on. They also have specified fields of use, whereas cloud computing architecture may be used in different institutions or by different people regardless of their demands. Specialists predict bright future for this technology and, in fact, their predictions are gradually coming true.
Characteristics
Cloud computing configuration turns out to be convenient and extremely functional both from the side of the owners and the side of the users of its infrastructure. Due to the unity of its resources and non persistent demand from the side of the user cloud computing let the owner use a lower amount of resources than specified amount of resources for each user. Due to the automation of procedure of modification of resources the cost of serving these pools is greatly lowered. From the side of the user, such services provide resources with high availability, access and lower risks of low functioning. At the same time, the used system is elastic enough to upscale the level of required resources without the need for creation and modernization of its own infrastructure. Moreover, the described pattern’s accessibility is characterized as high due to the large amount of supported hardware, such as computers, smartphones and tablets. Cloud computing seems to greater perspectives because of such features as an on-demand self service, elasticity of resources and services and broad network access. Thus, it is more flexible and powerful overall since it broadens traditional information management capabilities for IM leaders by introducing a hybrid approach that combines the benefits of both on-premises and cloud-based platforms together with unique set of data integration challenges.
Service and Perspectives of Deployment Models
There are three main types of deployment models that characterize the principles of operation of the cloud service. If the cloud is opened and managed within a single business entity disregarding its owner and the location of the hosts, it is called a private cloud. Thin type of virtualizing of business environment is expensive and faces the company with various challenges because they need the physical place and hardware installation and control. Requiring additional expenses and distracting the business entity from its main activity, this model, this type of cloud is regarded as non-perspective because of its similarity with usual data center.
Public cloud is a kind of cloud service, which enables the access of public users to its services via network. The structures of this concept might be free to access or requite buying a private cloud connection offered by the cloud provider. It may be owned, operated and used by a wide range of users or customers, starting from business and up to scientific and governmental organizations or their combinations. The examples of this technology that we see in real life are Amazon services, IBM’s cloud and Google Applications Engine.
Hybrid cloud combines the structure of private and public cloud, which stays separate units enclosed together. It may combine resources from different providers and its main advantage is the ability to enrich its power by integration with a different cloud service. This function significantly improves the cloud service’s abilities to expand when and how much needed by the user or the customer. In this case a business entity pays only for those cloud resources that extend its own limits. Fujitsu hybrid cloud and Microsoft Azure are one of the representatives of this approach in real life.
In the course of time the structure of cloud services change and their new kinds develop. Among them one may enumerate community and distributed clouds, which are services owned and operated by multiple entities in order to serve a certain community or a set of hardware that is united in a single cloud disregarding the physical distribution of its machines. Moreover, Intercloud and Multicloud are the concepts of cloud services that for either an interconnected cloud comprising another clouds or using different cloud services instead of different deployment models unlike hybrid clouds.
The models, enumerated above, are offered through different deployment models, such as software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS). Each deployment model has its own supporters providing its development and introducing and popularizing them among the clients.
For instance, cloud infrastructure as a service is regarded by the analysts to be providing self-service, on-demand, near-real-time access to scalable and elastic infrastructure resources, delivered by internal organization or external provider, being hosted either on the customer premises or in an external data center. Thus, it can be used by a broad range of IT companies and private entrepreneurs, opening a wide specter of IT capabilities. Being self-managed and extremely flexible it seems to be convenient in use both for the provider and the customer. It is said that this model greatly improves the agility and productivity of a business. Another prominent characteristic of the described model is its lower cost compared to the others.
While some group of specialist tends to favor IaaS model, others believe in the future of PaaS, highlighting the perspectives of private PaaS in boosting the IT business’ efficiency. Being oriented on a hybrid cloud marketplace, the given model is regarded to manage the proliferation of the tactically adopted and disjointed private and public PaaS with the help of providers that take responsibility for assembling, managing and sourcing the internally-advertised services. Thus, the described model is viewed as available for deep optimizations depending upon the demands of the customers.
Security and Privacy Issues
Security and privacy concerns are one of the primary issues of the cloud technology users and providers. Their worries are based on the facts that the data and resources remain distant from the users and can be accessed by the provider at any time. Moreover, some cloud users fear unauthorized access to their pools of data. Private cloud in this sense can be defined as the most secure type of a cloud service, because it provides physical control of the resources. Public cloud providers realize the issue with the security and due to the enlisted reasons the vast amount of money is spent annually to develop and provide the best security and privacy solutions for protecting the cloud computing technology. Another public concern is the loss of control over the stored data, when the users have no possibility to change the data or the software once uploaded. The data also can be stored even after it has been deleted by the user. These concerns have no concrete decision and are debatable.
The Future of the Technology
Though cloud computing involves certain risks its users and providers consider the technology to be perspective. There are some myths concerning the usage of the cloud, such as they always save money, having a cloud guarantees success, clouds should be used everywhere, the need for one cloud strategy or vendor, cloud is a data center, virtualization is a private cloud and so on. Such presumptions are impeding innovation, being the slowdown from real issues and solutions. That is why the issue should be discussed broadly and its basics should be explained to the public as well as business entities.
Nevertheless, cloud computing has become the mainstream of today’s technology and IT business. Each month more and more content is being transferred into a cloud, starting from mobile phone photos and videos and up to terabytes of virtual machine data. More than that, experts say the customers want to benefit from every kind of the technology. IT organizations desire multicloud service management and governance, which often limits the use of native public cloud services to the lowest common denominator, but their line-of-business customers want to take advantage of all cloud-native capabilities. Thus, this sector of IT is growing exponentially, providing fast solution for corporations and public users. The clients are becoming more cloud oriented in their choice. Despite all the threats and myths they consider the technology to bring success in their business. Disregarding the cases, when the technology failed, IT experts also render cloud computing as a prospective solution for modern IT issues.
Rapid technological development has brought society from the stage when specialists were operating slow machines located on special sites and taking much place to the stage when fast and powerful IT solutions can be accessed through the network, processing and storing immense amounts of data. Of course, some implications of these up to date technologies have drawbacks. One of the major examples of them is that the customers fear the technology is weak in terms of data privacy and security. Nevertheless, cloud computing is being more and more popular, resulting massive amounts of data and calculating power being transferred to cloud services. The technology also has some myths around it. For instance the usage of the cloud does not guarantee the company’s success and so on. However, all these cases are being explained by the experts, which see huge perspectives of the technology despite all the mentioned problems.
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