How Azure Is A Cloud Computing Platform And Infrastructure Provided By Microsoft Corporation For Building Essay

Since cloud environment does not reside in a capital facility, there is a substantial saving of the time and space. Also, it provides users access only to the resources they need for a particular task. This prevents them from paying for idle computing resources. Besides, there are competing providers for this service and an organization can always shift its business to another company offering better service or lower price. In terms of statistics, we spend $6,000 per month to update software, maintain our computer lab, and pay our employees. However, implementing a cloud computing with a constructing price of $2800 will incur a cost as low as $249 per month (Hinchcliffe 2009).

Cloud computing is an internet based computing which provides various applications and services like storage, servers, infrastructure, networking with low cost, on-demand self service, pay as you go model, location independent resource pooling, reasonable price , rapid elasticity etc. Cloud computing is one way to increase the capacity add capabilities without investing in new infrastructures like computer hardware involves storage memory, licensing for new software, training for a person and in a dynamic way.

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. Cloud Computing ............................................................................................................................ 3 WHAT ARE THE NECESSITIES OF CLOUD COMPUTING? ................................................................ 5 What are the needs of PaaS, IaaS, SaaS (Cloud Families)? ........................................................... 6 Pricing Models

Microsoft provides cloud utility computing services with Private Cloud, Office 365, Windows Azure and Dynamics CRM Online. Their services target every type of business from small, medium to large and deliver infrastructure, platform, and productivity capabilities, along with the option to choose public cloud, private cloud, or both. Microsoft’s SLA for their Windows Azure Storage service is at 99.9%. Microsoft does not provide the pricing for its cloud computing services readily on the website (http://www.microsoft.com/en-ca/cloud/default.aspx).

Aside from saving our company money by allowing us to cut budgets, the cloud offers cheap rates for businesses and the cloud is payed for only by our use. The cloud will only charge our company for whatever time we have used its services.

Windows Azure is a cost-effective solution to store and access your companies data. With this option there is no need to have servers in-house,

• On demand service- Cloud computing provide services to users on their demand .Users can access the services as they want.

Applications in today’s world consume resources on a wide variety of scale, one application could be CPU based while another could be network based which mean each application would saturate a few resources and under-utilize a few. With cloud computing, Pay as you go enables you to pay only for the utilized. For example, an application consumes only 50% of the processing power; you need not pay for the entire set of machines and would only pay for the utilized rate and cloud providers offer competitive prices today. To add to it operating costs like building space, power, cooling, maintenance of servers and network will be on the cloud service provider. The installation, upgrades and patches are easily done as cloud provider usually relies on virtual machines instead of physical equipment.

Business drivers and cost management: SharePoint Online doesn 't take long to set up and users can perform basic tasks quickly. Microsoft trickles improvements through every three months. For SharePoint Server (on-premise), Microsoft has traditionally aggregated changes to deliver them in service packs and new versions far less frequently. Consequently, IT departments using SharePoint Online will be relieved of possible downtime concerns related to service

Cost efficiency of using cloud computing for businesses allows the client take advantage of saving from things like licensing fees, cost of data storage, and other overhead charges (Tsagklis, 2013). Paul Croteau, an enterprise solution engineer at Rackspace (cloud computing company), says, “Cloud computing can create a significant return on investment, affording energy, licensing and administrative costs, and it frees up capital and personnel to innovate on new ideas quickly” (Olavsrud, 2013). Continuous availability is another great advantage when utilizing cloud computing

We have in mind that your business is continuously expanding. So, we have arranged for supporting infrastructure and hardware resiliency. You are at a fiscal gain due to scalability advantages of our cloud-based service while having a private environment.

The cloud refers to wide – area networks, generally the intent from which remote computing resources are shared as shown in the Fig 1.1. The cloud reduces costs and complexity and provides scalability. The biggest advantage that the cloud brings is to reduce costs and improve efficiency. An institution can rely on the ‘pay-as-you-go’ characteristic of the three pillars of cloud: PaaS and Saas. Ease of maintenance increase efficiency as the pain of maintaining the software is now shifted to the cloud service provider.

Microsoft Azure is one of the prominent uprising cloud services, providing platforms that provide both PaaS (platform as in services) and IaaS (Infrastructure as in services) services. Microsoft Azure is windows server based flexible cloud platform initially released in 2010 as Windows Azure and later renamed in the year 2014 as Microsoft Azure.

Azure provides Software as a Service (SaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). Azure support different programming languages, tools and frameworks.

When something is in the cloud, it means it is stored on servers on the Internet instead of on your computer. It lets you access your calendar, email, files, and more from any computer that has an Internet connection. I don’t have anything cloud base for the fear of getting hacked and getting my information stolen. Having certain items cloud based have its pro and cons I will name a few these are my personal opinions some people may not agree with me.