Cloud Computing: Wishful Thinking or a Viable Alternative? By Paul Gillespie Graduate student University of Maryland, University College IMAT 670 Abstract. The Internet is permeating all aspects of our lives. This includes business and organizational endeavors as well as our personal lives. Businesses have become to depend on the Internet for their supply chain, advertising, and sales. E-commerce has experienced a tremendous growth in the last decade. Organizations are looking for new ways to leverage the Internet for business growth. Web Services is a growing technology in the Information Systems field. Data Management is also an ever-increasing endeavor for many organizations. The need for information is …show more content…
The customer doesn't need upfront investment, servers, or licenses. (2) Utility Computing - offers storage and virtual servers that an organization can access on demand. (3) Web Services in the Cloud - instead of delivering full applications, this service allows users to access APIs for added functionality. (4) Platform as a Service - This offers a development environment as a service. You can use this technology to develop your own applications that run on the providers server. (5) Managed Service Provider - this is a service provided application that actually resides in the vendors cloud. Example are anti-virus and anti-spam applications. (6) Service Commerce Platforms - This offers a service hub that users interact with. It is a hybrid of SaaS and MSP. It can be thought of as an automated service bureau (7) Internet Integration - This service is in its infant stages. This will provide the ability to provide integrated solutions to its customers (Knorr and Gruman, 2008, p. 2). The concept is that giant clouds (such as Amazon and Google) could be melded together. Cloud computing is expected to be one of the major Information Systems trends in 2009. Weinberg lists cloud computing among his Nine Hot Technologies for 2009 (2008, p. 5). He describes three levels of clouds. The first level is infrastructure in the cloud. The
To ease the process of storing digital information, large corporations have developed cloud computing applications. The innumerable amount of cloud services is currently available to the public. Such services can be provided at the level of infrastructure, platforms, or applications. The most widespread are three service deliveries:
The overall concept of cloud computing is one which is based on a new architectural model of computer resources which means the data is stored remotely, but is provided to users as if it was stored locally. This new concept has been described as being "a style of computing where massively scalable IT-enabled capabilities are delivered 'as a service' to external customers using internet technologies" ("Will IT of the Future Have Its Feet Firmly Planted in the "Cloud"?," 2008), in a dramatic shift from traditional computing methods. Cloud computing is also able to provide services to the end user seamlessly, to serve applications from a central location, regardless of the user’s location. There are numerous services such as
Software-as-a-Service(SaaS): Network-based subscriptions to applications. It is not necessary to install any software on your computer while using SaaS. This enable to reduce the cost of maintenance as you do not need to buy or upgrade any software on your computer. The greatest feature of SaaS is that you have full access of services anywhere in the globe with internet connection. Examples of SaaS cloud services are: Google’s Gmail, Google’s Apps, Microsoft’s Office Live and others.
Software as a Service (SaaS): In this service provider provide an applications to consumers over internet.
• Salesforce.com — Runs its application set for its clients in a cloud, and its Force.com and Vmforce.com products offer developers with proposals to build customized version of cloud services.
In fourth section, the article discusses cloud offering under three types of service models. These are Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). IaaS provides fundamental computing resources (storage, network, processing) as a service where subscribers are able to deploy and run their choice of operating system and software applications. PaaS is the next level of service, where subscribers have an operating system in addition to hardware as a service, and have control over changes in the application and hosting environment. SaaS is the third level of service, in which client get software also as a service in addition to an underlying operating system and hardware. All the services offers pay-as-you-use.
In cloud computing, Clients access computers in the cloud over a system, specifically the web. The cloud is composed of the computers, the product on those computers and the system associations. The computers in the cloud are situated in server farms or server ranches which can be gotten to from wherever on the planet (Rainer and Cegielski, 2013).
Software and Platform as a Service describe the business model of users logging into a centralized hub to access their software products. Users open their files and software only while online, using only their web browser and passwords. It is similar to the idea of mainframe terminals, but cloud computing involves a much larger "cloud" (network) of processing computers at the center.
For example, services like WFS will now be Software as a Service (SaaS) as they offer functionality, such as spatio-temporal query. Similarly, processing services like WPS (Web processing Services) where the computation resources are provided via PaaS (Platform as a Service) and IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service). The benefits of using a cloud computing infrastructure from a networking perspective are standardized service interfaces between different clouds; the existing publish-find-bind pattern for service interaction can be reused.
The provision of computing resources (i.e. processing, memory, storage and network) to allow the customer to deploy and run their own operating systems and applications. Typically, virtualisation technologies are used to enable multiple customers to share the computing resources. The service provider is only responsible for managing and maintaining the underlying infrastructure hardware and virtualisation hypervisor3. Examples of IaaS offerings include the government IaaS platforms, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform. (Anon., n.d.)
Infrastructure as a service is another type of cloud service. IaaS “are self-service models for accessing, monitoring, and managing remote data center infrastructures, such as compute (virtualized or bare metal), storage,
The technology used in Cloud Computing is often centralized on demand and can be offered in terms of services. Just like most internet service providers, the cloud services provide platforms for their clients to create web services (applications) on the internet. These applications are accessed through the web opposed to running off your local hard drive. Cloud computing enables its users to conveniently use various resources like storage, servers, and applications that can be launched with minimal effort. In common terms, cloud computing proposes three types of services: 1) SaaS: Software as a service, 2) PaaS: Platform as a service, and 3) IaaS: Infrastructure as a service. Cloud
We can conclude from cloud computing that it is a significant technology which can be utilized nowadays and in the coming future to make everything easy. The project is to provide a web service using cloud computing, there are many web services, but all the web services need a platform to run on it which in this case is the virtual machine on cloud server. This will help users to access their data from any device or machine instead of using hard drives. My target in this project is to prove that cloud can be used for different kind of applications and purposes. An example of cloud web services is enabling the user to create a virtual machine on the cloud server of the web service provider. A virtual machine can be created and customized by the web service
Within the cloud computing infrastructure, there are four major providers of the cloud: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Windows Azure, Google AppEngine, and Open Source. Amazon Web Services is a provider of all three of the service models (SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS). Through the three service models, AWS is able to provide a collection of various computing services through the use of the internet. AWS offers the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Simple Storage Service (S3), and the SimpleDB.
Many years ago, to use software, businesses and organizations purchase traditionally packaged applications, such as Microsoft Office and Adobe Photoshop, and install them locally onto their computers. In the 1990’s, upon the expansion of the Internet, Application Service Provider (ASP) was introduced wherein businesses were provided with software that they can access over the Internet through a web browser. But then, service and financial failures occurred as a result of actions such as rushing the market offerings before issues were solved and failing to cut the costs for the customers at a greater extent because of having a unique server for each customer. Those scalability problems or the ability to adapt to increasing demands, and reliability problems eventually led to its downfall. Software as a Service (SaaS) or also known as “on-demand” then evolved from the ASP model. With SaaS, software is not installed in the customer’s computer but in the provider’s server somewhere else, and to access the software, the customer needs to connect to that server through either a thin client,which is a computer or a program that relies on another computer, or a web browser such as Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, or Google Chrome. Basically, it is also a software delivery model. But unlike the ASP, it has increased user awareness and is a multi-tenant based service which means that repairs, updates, and upgrades are applied once for all customers instead of one at a time, making