Monday, May 6, 2013

A Look At Cloud Service Providers

By Mona Moody


From the conventional phone services, communication service demands are growing in leaps and bounds. Cloud service providers have had to conduct awareness campaigns targeting firms saddled with older technology that inhibits customer interaction. In these times of social media, the bare survival of a given organization is highly dependent on the perceived quality of their customer experience.

Cloud computing is still a new concept and a lot of research and a dedication of resources has to be pledged to reap its full benefits. The idea is to come up with a distributed system that will allow users to share pooled resources without discrimination. Above all, the implemented system should be in a position to satisfy user requests with minimal human assistance.

A basic requirement for cloud services is the ability to access the resources from thick or thin clients irrespective of heterogeneity as far as client applications are concerned. The customer works under the impression of a single pool of data and services though they are located on different geographic locations. It is also likely that the system will automatically oversee the usage of resources based on the access rights reserved by a particular customer or client node.

Three models have been described based on the capabilities they present to the end user. The software as a service (SaaS)model allows customers to run applications belonging to the provider on a cloud. On the other hand Platform as a Service(PaaS) model allows distributed customers to use other consumer created applications in the hosting environment.

Many deployment models have been declared based on the access restrictions of clouds. Private clouds will only be used by members of the organization registered as the owner. The holding facility could either be located at their premises or at another location, sometimes under the jurisdiction of a third party firm.

Community clouds are reserved for consumer belonging to groups formed jointly by different organizations. A public cloud just as the name implies is freely accessible to members of the public and is maintained by academic or federal organizations. Hybrid clouds result from a combination of the ideas used in the first two categories.

This concept owes its existence to the architecture of main frames and thin clients that was popular in corporations and learning institutions. Some benefits to be reaped from the use of clouds include increased reliability and performance during disaster recovery. Applications located at fewer servers will also be easier to maintain as compared to a case where they were installed on each node. Multitenancy describes the flexibility of locating resources in the most favorable areas such as those with low power costs.

Many cloud service providers have been accused of being slack with addressing data security in their clouds. This has prompted them to adopt strict encryption techniques to reduce incidences of eavesdropping on data on transit. Security threats could also come from within the system in the form of malicious administrators. Despite all these challenges, this form of computing is gaining popularity and is projected to be a standard requirement for big firms in a few years time.




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