CLOUD COMPUTING
In this digital era where technology development keeps enhancing, managing information system infrastructure can be challenging for organizations as the evolution of hardware and software, the increasing demand for storage increment, and the rising cost of energy. Furthermore, organizations need a dedicated staff to maintain or even manage their infrastructure which certainly incurs further costs. As the results of technology development, the technological advances such as increasing internet bandwith and advances in virtualization have given a rise for one of the solutions to this matter: cloud computing. Further explanation about cloud computing will be explained below.
What is cloud computing?
As defined by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), “Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction”. In other words, cloud computing is the practice of using a network of remote servers hosted on the Internet to store, manage, and process data, rather than a local server or a personal computer. Cloud computing provides three distinct service models.
Services Models
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) IaaS model provided only the basic capabilities of processing, storage, and networking. Hence, the customer has the most control over the resources. For example, using Amazon Web Services, customer can choose computing power, memory, operating system, and storage based on individual needs and requirements, thus being able to build (almost) their entire infrastructure in the cloud. This service model of cloud computing provides the customer with the greatest flexibility, on the other hand, while the infrastructure is provided, managing software license is still responsibility of the customer, and setup costs are relatively high.
Platform as a Service (PaaS) with PaaS, customer can run their own applications, which are typically designed using tools provided by the service provider. PaaS allows the user to has a control over the applications but has limited or no control over the underlying infrastructure. One example of PaaS is Windows Azure. Windows Azure acts as a cloud service operating system which customer can use to deploy their own custom applications.
Software as a Service(SaaS) In SaaS service model, customer uses only applications provided via cloud infrastructure. Mostly, such applications include Web-based e-mail service (e.g., Google’s Gmail) and Web-based productivity suites (such as Google Docs). Further, applications in SaaS service also mostly include advanced applications such as CRM systems which provided by salesforce.com. With SaaS, customer does not have to worry about maintaining or updating the software, the underlying platform, or the hardware infrastructure. Therefore, Applications under this kind of service are mostly the easiest applications to deploy.
By using provided cloud computing services, an organization or enterprise may reduce the cost of managing and maintaining their IT systems. Rather than purchasing expensive systems and equipment for their businesses, cloud computing can reduce costs by using the resources which provided by the organization’s cloud computing service provider in one of the service models mentioned above.
