One of the biggest and most transformational concepts for this year will be the Cloud Evolution concept. This was first introduced to promises of limitless power for organizations to build their existing systems on, and led to a raw transformation of power into servers that had utilized it. Although the service started as a PaaS, (Platform as a Service), it has since then moved on to being considered Infrastructure as a Service. This is considered to be the next stage in internet evolution, containing the potential to deliver almost every form of service to you, in whichever form you need it. This includes computer infrastructure, applications, business processes or computing power of varying formats. The term cloud has been used to explain the way in which a set of devices come together to deliver the aspects of computer you require as a service, such as hardware, networking services, storage, interface and so on. Cloud Service puts under its umbrella the delivery of service, software, infrastructure and finally, storage. Since this is all done on the internet, the end-user has a lot of control over what is required and what is unnecessary.
Cloud computing is made up of four characteristics. These are:
- Elasticity while the ability to scale up and down can be utilized
- Self-service provisioning as well as automatic depronisioning if need be.
- Application programming interfaces (APIs)
- Metering of service usage so you don’t overpay
Everyone from small scale businesses to multinational organizations have been attracted to this form of service owing to the flexibility and versatility of this service. There are many participants in cloud computing, apart from the hardware in store. The end-user who places the order would generally not even have to know in-depth details of the underlying technology through which their product is being manufactured. The business management teams who are going to be liable for the governance of data as well as confidentiality of Cloud services will be another participant here. A conventional and guaranteed service level as well as security preferences will need to be discussed with the end user by said business management teams in this case.
The cloud service provider will also be part of this setup, as they are essentially responsible for the IT assets and maintenance of service. Cloud computing is offered in varying forms, such as public clouds, private clouds, hybrids which have the capacity to combine private and public clouds both. Examples of large organizations that utilize this computing technology are Google and Amazon, of whom most TI services are resourced in a cloud. Cloud computing is now one of the biggest trends for this year due to the fact that it can reduce time, cost, power and space phenomenally. Not only this, the traditional computing environment is eliminated, thus resulting in a much more limitless way of doing things.
