what is Cloud Computing

Whatsapp Channel

Safalta Expert Published by: Saksham Chauhan Updated Tue, 06 Sep 2022 02:19 AM IST

Highlights

Check Cloud Computing Here At Safalta.com

Free Demo Classes

By allowing you to "plug into" infrastructure through the internet and consume computer resources without installing and maintaining them on-premises, cloud computing turns IT infrastructure into a utility. Cloud computing is the on-demand use of computer resources housed in a distant data centre and controlled by a cloud services provider, such as programmes, servers (both physical and virtual), data storage, development tools, networking capabilities, and more (or CSP). These materials are made available by the CSP in exchange for a monthly subscription fee or usage-based charges. Download these FREE Ebooks:
1. Introduction to Digital Marketing
2. Website Planning and Creation

Cloud computing: What is it?

The technology that makes clouds function is often referred to as "cloud computing." This comprises some type of virtualized IT infrastructure, such as servers, operating systems, networking, and other infrastructure that has been abstracted using specialised software to allow pooling and dividing without regard to actual hardware boundaries.

Reduced IT expenses: By using the cloud, you may offload part or all of the costs and work associated with building, installing, configuring, and administering your own on-premises infrastructure.
Enhance your organization's agility and time-to-value by utilising the cloud instead of waiting weeks or months for IT to respond to a request, buy and configure necessary hardware, and install software.

Source: Safalta.com
Cloud also enables you to provide some users—more especially, developers and data scientists—free access to software and infrastructure assistance.
Scale more simply and affordably: Cloud offers elasticity, allowing you to scale capacity up and down in response to spikes and dips in demand rather of acquiring extra capacity that sits idle during slack periods. Additionally, you may use the world-wide network of your cloud provider to disseminate

Cloud service companies can utilise the full potential of their data centre resources thanks to virtualization. It should come as no surprise that many businesses have chosen the cloud delivery model for their on-premises infrastructure in order to get the most out of it, save money over traditional IT infrastructure, and provide the same level of self-service and agility to their customers. You almost certainly use some type of cloud computing every day if you use a computer or mobile device at home or at work, whether it's a cloud application like Google Gmail or Salesforce, streaming media like Netflix, or cloud file storage like Dropbox. A recent poll found that 92% of businesses utilise the cloud now (link is external to IBM), and the majority of them want to use it more in the upcoming year.

Cloud computing types

Private cloud

Private cloud is a cloud environment in which all cloud infrastructure and computing resources are devoted to, and accessible by, one client exclusively. Private clouds combine the access control, security, and resource customisation of on-premises infrastructure with many of the advantages of cloud computing, such as elasticity, scalability, and simplicity of service delivery. Usually, a private cloud is housed at the client's data centre on-site. However, a private cloud can also be constructed on rented infrastructure located in an offsite data centre or hosted on the infrastructure of a different cloud provider. An business offers itself the ability to quickly shift workloads to the public cloud or operate them in a hybrid cloud environment (see below) whenever they're ready by designing private cloud architecture in accordance with cloud native principles.

Hybrid cloud

The mix of public and private cloud infrastructures is what hybrid cloud refers to. An organization's private cloud services and public clouds are specifically and ideally connected to provide a unified, flexible infrastructure for operating its applications and workloads. The objective of a hybrid cloud is to provide a combination of public and private cloud resources with some degree of orchestration between them. This will allow an organisation to freely shift workloads between the two clouds as needed and to select the best cloud for any application or task. This makes it possible for the company to accomplish its technological and business goals more successfully and affordably than it could have done with just public or private cloud.

Public cloud

In a public cloud, a cloud service provider makes computing resources, such as SaaS apps, individual virtual machines (VMs), bare metal computing hardware, whole enterprise-grade infrastructures, and development platforms, accessible to users through a public network. These materials may be freely available, or access may be charged for using them in accordance with subscription-based or pay-per-use pricing structures. The public cloud provider typically offers high-bandwidth network connectivity to guarantee high performance and quick access to applications and data. It also typically owns, manages, and assumes full responsibility for the data centres, hardware, and infrastructure on which its customers' workloads run. The infrastructure of the cloud provider's data centre is shared by all users of the public cloud, which is a multi-tenant environment. These clients can number in the millions on the top public clouds, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Oracle Cloud. Over the past several years, the global market for public cloud computing has expanded quickly, and analysts anticipate that this trend will continue. According to industry researcher Gartner, global public cloud sales will surpass USD 330 billion by the end of 2022. (link resides outside IBM). Because public cloud services are elastic and easily scalable, they are being used by many businesses to move sections of their computer infrastructure to the cloud. This flexibility allows them to adapt to changing workload needs. Others are drawn by the promise of increased productivity and fewer resources squandered because consumers only pay for what they really use. Others aim to save costs for on-site infrastructures and hardware.

Hybrid multicloud and many clouds

The usage of two or more clouds from two or more separate cloud providers is known as multicloud. Using email SaaS from one vendor and picture editing SaaS from another may create a multicloud setup quickly and easily. However, when businesses discuss employing multiple clouds, they often mean using SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS services from two or more of the top public cloud providers. 85% of businesses reported adopting multicloud setups in one poll. The usage of two or more public clouds alongside a private cloud system is known as hybrid multicloud. Organizations adopt multicloud in order to have access to more innovation, prevent vendor lock-in, and a wider range of services. However, the more clouds you use, the harder it may be to manage your environment because each cloud has its own set of management tools, data transfer speeds, and security procedures. Through a common dashboard, multicloud management tools give development teams access to their projects and deployments across different provider clouds, operations teams to clusters and nodes, and cybersecurity personnel to threats.

Uses for the cloud

It would appear that there are countless uses for cloud computing given that 25% of businesses intend to shift all of their apps to the cloud within the next year. However, even for businesses not contemplating a complete migration to the cloud, some activities and cloud computing are an ideal IT fit. Since the cloud offers affordable redundancy to safeguard data against system failures and the physical distance needed to recover data and applications in the event of a local outage or disaster, disaster recovery and business continuity have always been natural fits for the cloud. Disaster Recovery as a Service is provided by all of the main public cloud service providers (DRaaS).

Cloud computing is used for anything that involves storing and processing massive amounts of data quickly and needs more storage and computing power than the majority of businesses can or want to invest in and implement on-premises. Examples comprise:

data analytics using big
Network of Things (IoT)
Artificial intelligence, especially applications that use machine learning and deep learning

The cloud provides the on-demand end-user self-service that prevents operations activities, such starting up development and test servers, from becoming development bottlenecks for development teams using Agile or DevOps (or DevSecOps) to speed development.

Cloud safety

Organizations have historically found it difficult to consider cloud services, especially public cloud services, due to security issues. But as a result of demand, on-premises security solutions are gradually losing ground to cloud service providers' security offerings. As of today, 52% of businesses enjoy greater security in the cloud than on-premises, according to security software firm McAfee (link resides outside IBM). Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) cloud workloads would see 60% fewer security incidents by this year (2020), according to Gartner's prediction (PDF, 2.3 MB) (link resides outside IBM).
However, compared to traditional IT settings, ensuring cloud security necessitates new practises and staff skill sets. The following are some examples of best practises for cloud security:

Shared security responsibility: In general, the client and cloud provider are both responsible for protecting their respective cloud infrastructure and data, but it's also crucial to clarify data ownership between private and public third parties.
Data encryption should be used for data while it is in use, transit, and at rest. Customer control over security keys and hardware security modules must be unrestricted.
Customer and IT teams want complete knowledge of and visibility over network, device, application, and data access. User identity and access management.
Collaboration in management will result in seamless cloud integrations that are secure and long-lasting. This will be made possible by good communication and transparent, easily understood procedures between IT, operations, and security teams.
Monitoring for security and compliance: To maintain visibility of all data exchanges between public, private, and hybrid cloud environments, it is first necessary to understand all regulatory compliance standards that are relevant to your industry and to set up active monitoring of all connected systems and cloud-based services.