Cloud computing is the buzzword that is being frequently discussed in the information technology circles for some years now.

The total market value of cloud computing is expected to exceed 241 billion by the year 2020.  

What exactly is cloud computing and what does cloud computing mean for your business?

Cloud computing refers to off-site services that provide software, processing and file storage for your information technology needs.

The resources are provided as a metered service (pay-for-what-you-use) over the Internet.

The applications that are delivered over the Internet are accessed by end users via web browsers.

Data and software are usually stored in remote servers and are accessed when required.

Infinite storage is available without any hassle whatsoever. The hardware needs of the client are drastically reduced and so are pesky maintenance problems.

The staff requirement to maintain the IT department can be reduced to a minimum.

In totality, this facility allows for shared services, faster installation and use of applications, and businesses and companies have the convenience of scaling their IT resources according to demand.

For technology companies and start-up businesses cloud computing provides the advantages of installing cheap new IT services, helping to  keep the start-up costs to a minimum.

The costs of setting up a web-based business is drastically different from what it was a few years ago. For a large business, utilization of such services have far reaching implications.

Capital investment can be drastically reduced. The operating expenditure is immensely scalable.

Though there are security concerns and other technical challenges that may accompany the shift, the overall savings in terms of time, effort, and money are worth the shift. It also provides a great opportunity for entrepreneurs to set up cloud-based software solutions sold as a service.

Security is an important issue to be addressed both by the company that provides cloud computing services and those that utilize the services. Many are not comfortable with entrusting business data to a third party.

However, end users would essentially would have to do this. Companies that offer cloud computing services offer data security through encrypted authentication.

Data needs to encrypted from point to point. The service providers need to install server farms and a superfast network bandwidth, and ensure high availability guarantees.

Cloud Computing services upgrade their software seamlessly. Many of the cloud computing services have introduced versioning procedures that enable businesses to go back to old files.

The main drawbacks of cloud computing are as follows:

• Security concerns that crop up on handing over your business data to a third party.

• If the cloud computing services go down, then your business is affected. However, experts are of the opinion that the costs are much less when compared to using desktop software.

• Cloud computing services charge for usage spikes which could lead to unpredictable costs.

The typical costs of cloud computing services stand at $0.100 per gigabyte, even less for reduced redundancy when your application is not critical, and $0.150 for high availability.

Using cloud computing services is thus a means of upscaling the IT needs of your business with minimum cost implications.

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A far off reality only a few years ago, today cloud computing has become mainstream. However, many small business owners we meet are still unclear about what cloud computing is and, more importantly, how it can benefit their business.

Cloud computing, or software as a service (SaaS), is when IT software and services are delivered over the web and through a browser. This transfers the responsibility for IT maintenance, software upgrades and any system issues onto the service provider, allowing enterprises like yours to focus on your core business instead of your infrastructure. That’s why the cloud is especially appealing to small-to-medium sized businesses, which often have a smaller workforce and less capacity for time-consuming and expensive IT maintenance.

To help you get more familiar with this concept that can streamline and improve your business operations, we’ve put together the following 10 things to consider when getting started in the cloud:

• Moving to the cloud is easy: The transfer of business information into the cloud is very straightforward. There is no need to install new hardware or software as everything is run by the cloud provider.
• Cost savings could be higher than you anticipate: Businesses that move to the cloud can make savings on many different levels – IT hardware and software expenditure is cut dramatically and fewer staff or support resources are needed for IT maintenance. Last September, analyst group IDC estimated that business can instantly reduce their IT spend by approx. 54% by moving to a cloud based solution.
• Improved productivity: One of the key benefits of cloud computing is that employees can access documents and emails whilst away from the office. If your business demands mobility and flexibility or you have staff keen to extend their use of home or remote working, the cloud could be a straightforward and affordable way of addressing these needs.
• Greater level of security: Cloud computing can be more secure than traditional IT. It’s all about economies of scale – many established cloud suppliers employ leading security experts, invest vast amounts of money into securing their applications and develop technology beyond the means of any small business. In addition, the risk of losing confidential data on a laptop or a USB stick is also diminished, as everything is stored in the cloud and not on your devices.
• Manage the cultural adjustment: Today’s employees expect to have the same technology at work that they enjoy at home. Google designs its applications with users in mind and many staff will already be familiar with Google Mail and Google Docs.
• A more collaborative way of working: Using cloud computing applications, people can work more closely together, accessing and working in the same documents in real time – without the need for hundreds of emails with attachments. Improved knowledge sharing and communication encourages creativity amongst your employees which can help drive the business forward.
• Flexibility to scale up or scale down your business: Cloud based “pay as you go” style services allow you to easily increase your use of cloud services as your business grows, or decrease your spend if you need to temporarily scale down.
• Employees of tomorrow: Look at how teenagers interact – on Facebook, Bebo or MySpace – all cloud environments. These teenagers will soon become employees, accustomed to collaborating online and accessing their data from any mobile device at hand, not expecting to work in one location and from 9 to 5.
• Your business resiliency can be improved: Cloud computing providers should not only offer 24/7 support but also the increased resiliency and redundancy afforded by multiple data centres to ensure your information is always available. This means that you experience less downtime than when managing IT in-house, and any problems can be solved far quicker by being fixed centrally. IDC estimates that businesses operating in the cloud achieve 97% greater IT reliability.
• More choice: In contrast to traditional IT models which can involve expensive software licenses and long lock-in contracts, the cloud model offers far more flexibility. You can switch provider far more easily and regularly in order to get the best experience and value for money. However, it is important to check with your cloud provider as to how you retrieve data from their cloud should you choose to switch in the future.

Incase, you haven’t read the first part, no worry, you can read now Benefits of Cloud Computing – Part I

In our earlier posts we had explained what is cloud computing and types of Cloud computing and if you haven’t shifted to Cloud computing and still wondering why you should use that? Well, here are few things which might make you think otherwise and shift you in using Cloud services.

Elasticity

This is the most important attribute of the Cloud. You might start running your application on just a single server. But in no time, Cloud Computing enables you to scale your application to run on 100′s of servers. Once the traffic and usage of your application decreases, you can scale down to 10′s of servers. All this happens almost instantly and the best thing is your application and your customers don’t even realize that. This dynamic capability to scale up and scale down is called Elasticity. Elasticity brings an “illusion of Infinity”. Though nothing is infinite in this world, your application can get any number of resources as it demands. This is the biggest unique selling point of the Cloud. Now, think of web hosting. When you want to add another server to your web application, your hoster has to manually provision that for you. Adding additional servers and configuring the network topology introduces additional time lag that your business cannot afford. Most of the Cloud Computing vendors offer an intuitive way of manipulating your server configuration and topology. Elasticity is the single most important attribute of the Cloud.

Pay-By-Use

Elasticity and Pay-By-Use attributes go hand in hand. When you are scaling up your application by adding more resources, you know how much it is going to cost you. Pay-By-Use is a boon for the startups. As an entrepreneur, you got to balance your investment between human resources and IT resources. The analogy that I typically use is that of DTH TV subscription. During the season of Cricket World Cup, you would want to subscribe to the sports channels and unsubscribe that moment the event is over. With Pay-By-Use, you can subscribe and unsubscribe to the IT infrastructure based on your needs and you only pay for what you use. This is the most optimal way of spending your IT budget.

Self Service

When you are able to enjoy the capability of scaling up and scaling down and only pay for what you use, you never want to wait for someone in the datacenter to add an additional server to your application. Cloud can deliver its promise only when there is Self Service. Through this, you can control the resources all by yourself without an intermediary. When you add a new CPU core, a server instance or add extra storage, you do it by yourself by using the Console offered by the Cloud provider. This results in reduction in IT support and maintenance. Today most of the organizations have dedicated IT teams to provision a new machine, storage, collaboration portal and mailboxes as a part of on-boarding the new employees. Through Self Service, a fairly non-technical person can achieve these tasks and you don‟t need certified system administrators to do this. For example, when you sign up with Google Apps, it is very simple and intuitive to configure the mailboxes for the employees. With more and more applications moving the Cloud, Self Service becomes the preferred way of configuring and managing the IT infrastructure.

There are many advantages of Cloud Computing over traditional Computing but as they say – Everything has its own Pros and Cons. In our earlier posts What is Cloud Computing and Types of Cloud Computing, we have mostly talked about the advantages of Cloud Computing. In this post, we will talk about the Risks involved in Cloud Computing.

Data in the cloud is typically in a shared environment alongside data from other customers and since it’s in shared environment, so the customers are ultimately responsible for the security and integrity of their own data, even when it is held by a service provider. Many customers have no idea how exposed they really are when they put a website or other corporate application on someone else’s hardware.

SaaS Chronicles has put together a good list that can help gain more insights into security and provide some additional context for the ways data does flow in the cloud:

• Where will my data be stored?
• Who will have access to my sensitive data?
• What controls do you have in place to ensure safety for my data while it is stored in your environment?
• What type of employee / contractor screening you do, before you hire them?
• Will my data be replicated to any other datacenters around the world (If yes, then which ones)?
• What is your Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity strategy?
• Is your Cloud Computing service SAS70 compliant?
• Do you offer single sign-on for your services?
• How do you detect if an application is being attacked (hacked), and how is that reported to me and my employees?
• Do I have full ownership of my data?
• Will you provide me my data in a readable format – Pdf, Excel, Access…?
• Do you offer a way for me to run your application locally and how quickly I can revert to the local installation?

While cloud security is still a critical issue and something that must be taken extremely serious by all vendors, the mood is shifting towards general acceptance of security in the cloud.

What do you think? What questions do you suggest asking about cloud security?

Cloud computing is an approach to client-server in which the “server” is a dynamically scalable network of loosely coupled heterogeneous nodes that are owned by a single institution, and the “clients” are a wide variety of individuals and institutions that use fractions of shared nodes to run jobs that are transient with respect to time, compute-intensity, and storage-intensity.

Cloud services are offered at three levels, or tiers, that are distinguished by the level of abstraction that each presents to the client. Cloud computing takes that abstraction one further step. Rather than making one server appear to be several, it makes an entire data-center’s worth of servers, networking devices, systems management, security, storage and other infrastructure, look like a single computer.

1) Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), which looks to the client like a dynamically scalable pool of compute and/or storage resources. The basic metered unit of IaaS is usually either a single virtual machine or an abstract storage object of a certain size. Because of the economies of scale and specialization involved, this can be to the benefit of both the business providing the infrastructure and the one using it.

2) Platform-as-a-service (PaaS), which provides API-level access to a cloud infrastructure layer. Examples of PaaS are Google AppEngine and Force.com. Because PaaS offerings often come wrapped in a vendor-specific API, the use of this layer pretty much locks you into a particular vendor.

3) Software-as-a-service (SaaS), This is the most popular tier of cloud service and it deliver’s software as a service over the Internet, eliminating the need to install and run the application on the customer’s own computer. Google Apps and Salesforce.com are the two paradigmatic SaaS examples.

The cloud represents a huge step forward in the democratization of access to compute resources. The cloud model differs from traditional outsourcers in that customers don’t hand over their own IT resources to be managed. Instead they plug into the “cloud” for infrastructure services, platform (operating system) services, or software services (such as SaaS apps), treating the “cloud” much as they would an internal data center or computer providing the same functions.

Cloud computing is pretty big and is growing bigger everyday, so are the people who uses it.

Daryl Plummer, managing vice president of Gartner said “Service providers either do not offer protections or vary greatly in the protections they do offer.”

To protect basic rights of cloud computing consumers, Gartner has defined six rights and one responsibility of service customers that will help providers and consumers establish and maintain successful business relationships. They include:

1) The right to retain ownership, use and control one’s own data — Service consumers should retain ownership of, and the rights to use, their own data. The Council insisted on the importance of data security in the issue of ownership and control. The provider must specify what it can do with the consumer’s data. Lack of clarity on this point can lead to costly legal battles. Lastly, the consumer could lose control of its data if the service provider goes out of business or is sold to another company. The original contract or service-level agreement must provide for the clear disposition of the service consumer’s data, in case the provider can no longer provide service.

2) The right to service-level agreements that address liabilities, remediation and business outcomes — All computing services — including cloud services — suffer slowdowns and failures. However, cloud services providers seldom commit to recovery times, specify the forms of remediation or spell out the procedures they will follow. To make service-level agreements relevant to the business, providers do not have to customize them for every consumer; rather, the agreements should comprehensively address the business issues implied in the type of service offered. The provider’s contract should not simply guarantee a certain turnaround time for adding capacity; it should specify how it will deliver that capacity.

3) The right to notification and choice about changes that affect the service consumers’ business processes — Every service provider will need to take down its systems, interrupt its services or make other changes in order to increase capacity and otherwise ensure that its infrastructure will serve consumers adequately in the long term. Protecting the consumer’s business processes entails providing advanced notification of major upgrades or system changes, and granting the consumer some control over when it makes the switch. Such changes might include upgrading a software-as-a-service application, implementing salesforce.com, introducing new versions of services, changing the location from which the service is provided, entering or exiting a business, shuttering a facility, and so on.

4) The right to understand the technical limitations or requirements of the service up front — Most service providers do not fully explain their own systems, technical requirements and limitations so that after consumers have committed to a cloud service, they run the risk of not being able to adjust to major changes, at least not without a big investment. Service consumers and providers must do a better job of keeping each other informed about their technical limitations, particularly for complex, long-term projects or complex architectures and systems.

5) The right to understand the legal requirements of jurisdictions in which the provider operates — If the cloud provider stores or transports the consumer’s data in or through a foreign country, the service consumer becomes subject to laws and regulations it may not know anything about. Service providers have not done a good job of explaining which jurisdictions they put data in and what legal requirements the service consumer must, therefore, meet. The service consumer needs reassurance that the provider does not violate any country’s rules for which the consumer may be held accountable.

6) The right to know what security processes the provider follows — With cloud computing, security breaches can happen at multiple levels of technology and use. Service consumers must understand the processes a provider uses, so that security at one level (such as the server) does not subvert security at another level (such as the network). Without this knowledge, service consumers risk security violations caused solely by the provider not accounting for the ways in which consumers might use a service. Service consumers also need to understand a provider’s business continuity plans, so that they can ensure that their own operations continue in an emergency. Service providers are not consistent in explaining either their security processes or their business continuity plans.

The responsibility to understand and adhere to software license requirements — Providers and consumers must come to an understanding about how the proper use of software licenses will be assured. On the one hand, providers must be held harmless, if the service consumer puts the software it licenses from a third party in the cloud yet violates the licensing agreement. On the other hand, the provider should not agree to an audit directly by the vendor, if the consumer owns the software licenses. The service consumer must take charge of the audit, because it needs to consider the whole context — both what the consumer runs in the cloud (perhaps using several service providers) and what it runs on its own infrastructure.

Cloud Computing as the name suggests computing on the cloud. Cloud computing might be more accurately described as “sky computing,” with many isolated clouds of services which IT customers must plug into individually. Cloud symbol is often used to represent the Internet in flowcharts and diagrams. In Cloud computing all a user need is a Computer and Internet, rest everything is managed by the service provider. Services can be anything from Web-based email to inventory control and database processing. Because the service provider hosts both the application and the data, the end user is free to use the service from anywhere.

The major cloud service providers include Microsoft, Salesforce, Skytap, Amazon, Google and HP.

Cloud computing is pretty big and is growing bigger everyday. There are basically 3 layers in Cloud Computing i.e. Infrastructure, Platform and Application. Most cloud computing infrastructures consist of services delivered through common centers and built on servers.

Clouds often appear as single points of access for all consumers’ computing needs. You can put anything ranging from your website, or application to any software that you can remotely access it. It works the same way as Electricity, when you turn on the light, meter start running and you are billed for the power you consumed. When are you done with it, you switch off the light and meter stops. Key to cloud computing is not to focus on the hardware, you just focus on your website or on your application.

There are 3 reasons why Cloud computing is getting popular
1) Scalability – you can easily grow to your demand.
2) Instant – computer power is instantly available, whenever you need it.
3) Save Money – You only pay for what you use.