What is Cloud Computing Anyways?


Much of the excitement around cloud computing stems from the strong tangible and intangible benefits it offers to those companies that adopt it. Cloud computing is an innovative model for delivering IT infrastructure, applications and data that shifts the emphasis from static, stand-alone application to dynamic, shared environments, dynamically allocated among various tasks and accessed via a network.

1. SaaS
SaaS cloud computing delivers a single application through the browser to thousands of customers using a multi-tenant architecture. On the customer side, it means no up-front investment in servers or software licensing; on the provider side, with just one application to maintain, costs are lower compared to conventional hosting. Salesforce.com is by far the best-known example among enterprise applications.

2. Utility computing
Utility computing has been predominantly used for supplemental, non-mission-critical needs in the past .But now technological advances have been made to provide solutions that help IT create virtual datacenters from commodity servers. This enables IT to stitch together memory, I/O, storage, and computational capacity as a virtualized resource pool available over the network.

3. Web services in the cloud
Closely related to SaaS, Web service providers offer APIs that enable developers to exploit functionality over the Internet, rather than delivering full-blown applications.

4. Platform as a service
Another variation of SaaS, this form of cloud computing delivers development environments as a service. You build your own applications that run on the provider’s infrastructure and are delivered to users via the Internet from the provider’s servers. Y

5. Service commerce platforms
A hybrid of SaaS, this cloud computing service offers a service hub that users interact with. They are most common in trading environments, such as expense management systems that allow users to order travel or secretarial services from a common platform that then coordinates the service delivery and pricing within the specifications set by the user.

6. Internet integration
As virtualization and SOA permeate the enterprise, the idea of loosely coupled services running on an agile, scalable infrastructure has eventually made every enterprise a node in the cloud

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