What Makes the Cloud Work?
Cloud Application. This is the apex of the cloud pyramid, where applications are run and interacted with via a web browser, hosted desktop or remote client. A hallmark of commercial cloud computing applications is that users never need to purchase expensive software licenses themselves. Instead, the cost is incorporated into the subscription fee. A cloud application eliminates the need to install and run the application on the customer's own computer, thus removing the burden of software maintenance, ongoing operation and support.
Cloud Platform. The middle layer of the cloud pyramid, which provides a computing platform or framework as a service. A cloud computing platform dynamically provisions, configures, reconfigures and de-provisions servers as needed to cope with increases or decreases in demand. This in reality is a distributed computing model, where many services pull together to deliver an application or infrastructure request.
Cloud Infrastructure. The foundation of the cloud pyramid is the delivery of IT infrastructure through virtualization. Virtualization allows the splitting of a single physical piece of hardware into independent, self governed environments, which can be scaled in terms of CPU, RAM, Disk and other elements. The infrastructure includes servers, networks and other hardware appliances delivered as "Web Services", "farms" or "cloud centers". These are then interlinked with others for resilience and additional capacity. |
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Why switch from traditional IT to the cloud?
-> Removal / reduction of capital expenditure
-> Reduced administration costs
-> Improved resource utilization
-> Economies of scale
-> Scalability on demand
-> Quick and easy implementation
-> Quality of service
-> Guaranteed uptime, SLAs
-> Anywhere Access
-> Disaster recovery / backup built-in |
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Public Cloud
Public cloud (also referred to as "external" cloud) describes the conventional meaning of cloud computing: scalable, dynamically provisioned, often virtualized resources available over the Internet from an off-site third-party provider, which divides up resources. ClarityGrid is a service from Transformyx that provides a multi-tenant architecture for supplying services such as Hosted Desktops, Software and Platform as a Service. Other popular cloud vendors include Google Apps, Salesforce.com and Amazon EC2.
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Private Cloud
Private cloud (also referred to as "corporate" or "internal" cloud) is a term to describe a proprietary computing architecture providing hosted services on private networks. This type of cloud computing is generally used by large companies, to allow their corporate network and data centre admins to effectively become in-house "service providers" catering to "customers" within the corporation. However, it negates many of the benefits of cloud computing, as organizations still need to purchase, set up and manage their own clouds.
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Hybrid Cloud
It has been suggested that a hybrid cloud environment combining resources from both internal and external providers will become the most popular choice for enterprises. For example, a company could choose to use a public cloud service for general computing, but store its critical data within its own data centre. This may be because larger organizations are likely to have already invested heavily in the infrastructure required to provide resources in-house – or they may be concerned about the security of public clouds.
| | Hybrid cloud Find out More | |
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