Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Cloud Computing in India - The Bubble Ready to Burst



Cloud Computing technology, is all about providing IT related resources such as computing, storage, network, system security, application, platform as a service and more, where these services are charged based on the usage. Cloud computing is proving to be a major driver for small and medium businesses as they do not need to spend large amount of money on buying hardware, software and upgrading and maintaining it.


Cloud computing has been there for a long time globally and has caught up in India over the last few years, but is being used by big companies only. Smaller firms and individuals are trying to catch up to the concept, which can cut down on operation costs phenomenally and help monitor businesses on the move.


Scalability is one of the major issues for organizations as they grow. Cloud computing offers a lot of ease here since expanding on the cloud is relatively quick and cheaper. There are a number of cloud service models that can be provided to the customers, each catering to different kind of need of the organizations. You may find internet hits with dozens of offering on Cloud as a Service: Desktop, Security, Data, Software, Platform, Infrastructure, IT, Testing, Hardware, Computing, Database, Storage etc.

The most accepted types of Service Models are
  • SaaS (Software as a Service)
  • PaaS (Platform as a Service)
  • IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service)
Software as a Service - With every organization using different platforms, operating systems, and hardware, providing data access with a tool that works in every environment and training every new external user can be a challenge. That is where SaaS has an upper hand. It is the combination of a Business Model and a Software Delivery Model and is a way of providing the same software to different consumers via the Internet and not hosted on the customers' individual computers.

The question on how can SaaS providers adjust IT infrastructure hosting and management to compensate for budget pressures while maintaining comprehensive SLAs? This can be done by shifting the management of day-to-day IT operations of its SaaS infrastructure to a cloud hosting provider or a managed service provider. SaaS providers can focus on developing new and innovative services and efficiently scale their SaaS business and drive revenue growth.

Platform as a Service (PaaS) – is the delivery of a computing platform and solution stack as a service. It helps with deployment of applications without the added cost and complication of buying and managing the hardware and software and provisioning hosting capabilities. 

PaaS provides complete facility required to support the life cycle for application design, application development, testing, deployment and hosting as well as application services such as team collaboration, web service integration and marshalling, database integration, security, scalability, storage, persistence, etc.  PaaS aids in faster application delivery, pay-as-you-go model and provides opportunities to solve new problems.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Infrastructure as a Service is described as a model, where in devices required to assist in IT operations, such as networking, storage, servers and other hardware components are outsourced. The service provider is in charge of the equipment and is accountable for operating, maintaining and housing it. The client or the end user simply compensates on a per-use basis.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) being the primary foundation of cloud computing, execution of SaaS and Paas depends on this foundation. It allows an application to be operated and monitored on a virtual computer selected by the users i.e. users can fix up a CPU configuration and the memory storage that is required for a particular application.  Entire cloud infrastructure is offered by cloud computing providers these days, that include routers, servers, hardware based load balancing, storage, firewalls, and many other network necessities that the user requires.  

Cloud hosting services in India is still at its nascent stage and is still evolving to harness Cloud Computing technologies and services to its best advantage.  The service providers are free to innovate and offer various services and there are no hard and fast rules governing these service offerings.

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