CLOUD COMPUTING – THE NEW BUZZ WORD

In modern day computing, the term “cloud computing” is a much used term. But what exactly is cloud computing all about? It is about using the recourses already present in the World Wide Web for better resource utilization, lesser cost in capital expenditure and increased scalability of hardware and software.

In cloud computing, the customers, better known as tenants, use third party resources to cut capital expenditure on hardware such as data storage as an example and pay rent for the resources used by them. Billing occurs on input/output resources, load balancing, IP addresses, GET requests and Put requests related to database management queries etc. It is not that, only the large companies take advantage of it. Individual users can take advantage of it as well. A person using online data storage is a good example of cloud computing. Using Google is another example of cloud computing.

Data storage, HTTP services, Web based services related to ASP, network based access to commercially available software, centrally managed multi-tenant architecture support – all come under the purview of cloud computing.

Well, we have already talked a lot about ‘Cloud Computing’. But we still did not discuss what a “cloud” is? Cloud is nothing but a diagrammatic representation of the World Wide Web to indicate the internet world outside the user’s computer system. A cloud could be of the type “public”, “private” and “community” depending upon the accessibility and security features.

Where security, device and location independence, scalability and cost could be the advantages of cloud computing, on the other hand there are some privacy issues associated with Cloud Computing as well. It has been found that due to security reasons of the country some espionage activities have occurred in the domain of “secured” cloud computing. While discussing about security, we must mention the presence of a few online antivirus scanners like Panda Cloud Antivirus. The concept is that, it takes lesser time to update a central server related to virus signatures instead of testing virus updates in separate laboratories. The concept is good enough as far as a quick response-time to a new virus is concerned but it is yet to be termed as the best.