Cloud Computing

One of the most overused buzz words in the IT world is “the cloud”.  The term cloud refers to networks specifically on the Internet.  Cloud technologies enable IT departments to increase or add capabilities as needed with purchasing equipment and software, training employees to support it, using office space, power, and cooling to house it.

They provide immediate access to new, always on features from nearly any device in any location.  They also provide the business a predictable, subscription-based, pay-per-use way to fund IT.

Let’s take a look at some types of clouds.

Public Clouds – This type of cloud provides a pool of shared computing resources, applications, and storage.  They generally allow you to grow or shrink these resources as needed and often times provide built-in failover and redundancy.  The security on a public cloud is not very good so using a private firewall won’t keep your information secure.

Private Clouds – Private clouds provide a dedicated service that is exclusive use and in result can be secured and accessed privately.  The security is much better because it is exclusive to only one business.  Private clouds cannot grow or shrink and do not include failover and redundancy.

Hybrid Clouds – This type is the best of both worlds.  A hybrid cloud suffers from the complexity involved in integrating and the cost is high due to dedicate hardware, security devices and networking.

There are some companies who provide these services.  Let’s look at some and what they offer.

Amazon Web Services – Offers all types of services that include simple storage service and on-demand storage capacity.

AT&T (Synaptic Hosting) An application hosting service that offers a pay-as-you-go access to virtual servers and storage integrated with security and networking functions.

Google (Google Apps) – This service includes a set of on-line office productivity tools including email, calendaring, word processing, and a simple web site creation tool.

Microsoft (Azure) – A Windows-as-a-service platform consisting of the operating system and developer services that can be used to build and enhance web-hosted applications.

Rackspace (Rackspace Cloud) – Rackspace consists of three major services: Cloud sites.  Platforms used for building websites, Cloud Files, storage service and cloud servers.

SalesForce.com – Salesforce.com comes with tools including salesforce automation, analytics, marketing, and social networking tools.  Another major offering is Force.com which is a platform for building web applications and hosting them on a Salesforce infrastructure.

Please feel free to forward this information to others.  If you would like to learn more on this topic or would like to request an area of technology you are interested in, please send me an email.