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What Are Cloud Computing?

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INTRODUCTION WHAT IS CLOUD COMPUTING? Cloud computing, or “the cloud”, is defined by NIST as; “...a model for enabling 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. This cloud model promotes availability and is composed of five essential characteristics, three service models, and four deployment models.” [1] The three cloud computing service models NIST speaks of, also called SPI, are: Cloud Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). The four deployment …show more content…

This is significant as properly optimized usage of computing power translates into less power being used by the physical hardware, the air conditioning to keep it cool and so forth, minimizing environmental damage. [2] Similarly to dealing with a utility, users of cloud computing services are charged according to their usage of these remote computing and storage resources rather than having to buy, install and manage them all themselves. This allows users a great deal of flexibility. They can scale up or down according to market fluctuations or changes of strategy. For example; consider a business that creates a new website and almost overnight find themselves inundated with hundreds of thousands of requests per day. If they were going about managing their website the traditional way in order to meet the new demand, they would have to rapidly purchase new equipment, set it up and perhaps even hire new people to administrate the website, all of which takes time. However if this same company used cloud computing they could expand their site to meet the increased demand within a fraction of the time and would then still have the option of returning to their original size with little difficulty, reducing overall costs.[3] To put it simply, cloud computing allows users to operate with a minimum set of resources and only

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