Cloud Computing 101

Cloud computing is a technological revolution in the business world that has changed the face of computing and enterprise IT solutions. But what is it, exactly?

At its simplest, cloud computing is the delivery of computing services—including servers, storage, databases, networking, software, analytics, artificial intelligence, and more—over the Internet ("the cloud"). It provides a simple way to access servers, storage, databases, and a broad set of application services over the Internet. This means you don't have to own, buy, or maintain physical data centers or servers and can access technology services, such as computing power and storage, on an as-needed basis.

Benefits of Cloud Computing

Cloud computing offers a myriad of benefits for businesses and developers, including:

1. Cost Efficiency: Cloud computing eliminates the need for businesses to invest in stand-alone software or servers. Expenses are significantly reduced by providing on-demand computing resources on a pay-as-you-go basis.

2. Scalability: It's easy to quickly scale up or down your business's operation and storage needs to accommodate growth or save on costs. This level of agility can give businesses using cloud computing a real advantage over competitors.

3. Data Recovery: The cloud can assist with data backup and recovery since your data is stored in the cloud rather than on your hard drive.

4. Mobility: Employees can work from anywhere as long as they have an Internet connection.

5. Collaboration Efficiency: With cloud computing, teams located in different geographies can collaborate in a highly convenient and secure manner.

6. Control over the Data: It provides complete visibility and control over your data, and accessing and managing it from one platform helps maintain consistency and minimize human error.

Types of Cloud Computing

There are mainly three types of cloud computing based on the deployment model:

1. Public Cloud: Public clouds are owned and operated by third-party service providers. Customers benefit from economies of scale because infrastructure costs are spread across all users.

2. Private Cloud: A private cloud refers to cloud computing resources used exclusively by a single business or organization. Private clouds can be physically located at your organization’s on-site data center, or they can be hosted by a third-party service provider.

3. Hybrid Cloud: Hybrid clouds combine public and private clouds, bound together by technology that allows data and applications to be shared between them.

Furthermore, based on the service that the cloud is offering, we categorize as:

1. IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service): It provides the infrastructure such as virtual machines and other resources like virtual-machine disk image library, block and file-based storage, firewalls, load balancers, IP addresses, virtual local area networks, etc.

2. PaaS (Platform as a Service): In this type, cloud providers deliver a computing platform, typically including operating systems, programming language execution environment, database, web server, etc.

3. SaaS (Software as a Service): In this service model, the cloud-based applications are provided to the user as a service on demand. It is a single instance of the service running on the cloud, and multiple end users are serviced.