where are the clouds?
implementations
HOW IT WORKS
While the idea of cloud computing is very simple, the actual implementation of it can be very technical. Cloud computing is a great example of a Software as a Service (Saas), whereas the cloud-based application are run on servers that are not owned or managed by you or your company. This provider could be anyone that we've already mentioned, or a new startup. Examples like IBM, AWS, Rackspace, Azure, and Terremark usually come to mind. By relying on a third party to provide the resources necessary to host and run your applications, your application becomes much more scalable and resistant to being brought down due to load issues. TYPES OF CLOUD There are many different types of clouds. There are public, private and hybrid clouds that all work a bit differently. In a public cloud, such as AWS (Amazon Web Services), your virtual machine (VM) is stored on servers alongside other businesses VMs. Each has their own firewalls and software that isolate one another, but this type of cloud is not commonly used to store sensitive data because of the potential risk. At a company like General Electric (GE), they store low-risk files and applications in the public cloud that do not contain any sensitive information. In a private cloud, the servers operate more like your own data center because the hardware may either be on your own property or segregated from your cloud provider's regular public servers. In this case, you own the entire server and therefore your data becomes more secure. This eliminates the "nosy neighbor" problem that a public cloud may have. What makes private cloud any different than a company-owned data center though? Well, private clouds are still run by some companies such as Rackspace and they offer the management and security upkeep of your servers. By giving a private company the responsibility of upkeep on the server, it incentivises uptime in order to earn a profit. This ensures that you have full control of the server and the performance that you expect without having your own dedicated environment and overhead that comes along with building out your own data center. Finally, there is the hybrid cloud that is a mixture of the two types mentioned above. A hybrid cloud allows you to virtually merge the benefits of private cloud with the scalability and ease of using a public cloud. For example, if you have a low-risk application for creating surveys at your company and you are having sensitive data input in some of the surveys, you could use a hybrid cloud. You could store the application itself, the styles and coding that make the application run on a public cloud. Then, you could seamlessly store the results of the survey in a private cloud. This offers the application scalability so that the public cloud aspect can grow into more servers and added redundancy during peak times, but it ensures that your company's secrets would be in a very low-risk environment because there are physical barriers between your data and that from another user. REFERENCES http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/private -- Rackspace Private Cloud (information on private and hybrid cloud, specific services that Rackspace offers as packages to their clients) http://www.ibm.com/cloud-computing/us/en/what-is-cloud-computing.html -- IBM Cloud Computing (information on all three types of clouds) |
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