Cloud Computing Services-For Flexible and Scalable Resources

Today's global enterprises have been benefited with technological breakthroughs. Their widely distributed

offices, manufacturing units and offshore teams are well connected through the corporate network.

Allowing partners, employees, vendors and customers an access to the servers and storage devices also

challenges the enterprises with security issues. It thus becomes necessary for the enterprises to move their

infrastructure and critical application and data to exclusive areas called data centers.

Nevertheless, depending on the size of business transactions, these data centers can either be housed in the

same office complex or are placed in different locations. The small and medium business enterprises opt for

data centers with shared hosting services. However, with the ever-changing and increasing demands from

the customers and the growth in technology calls for an upgrade of the systems, applications, expansion of

networks or even increase of storage server capacity. The requirements for an inherent upgrade of server

capacities and storage systems have led to the development of cloud computing services.

Wikipedia defines Cloud computing as “the use of computing resources (hardware and software) that are

delivered as a service over a network (typically the Internet)”. The 'cloud' is actually a virtualized and

centralized system of storage servers, memory, application processing and bandwidth that provides the

users an on-demand access of the network services. Further, by entrusting the remote services with a user's

data, the cloud computing services can be offered either as Infrastructure as a service (IaaS), Platform as a

service (PaaS), Software as a service (SaaS) or Network as a service (NaaS) besides many more options.

Irrespective of the type of service, the cloud computing services in general brings in significant reduction in

costs, increases the storage availability. Being highly reliable these services allows for increased mobility of

workforce while the high automation levels provides flexibility and control of data. In-built with the key

characteristics such as agility, application programming interface (API), device and location independence,

Virtualization, Multi-tenancy, Reliability, elasticity, security and maintenance these cloud computing service

providers offer their clients a scalable and customized services equipped to meet the requirements of

business continuity disaster recovery of the global business.

Besides, the cloud computing services also benefits the enterprises with

· Access to vast range of applications without the requirement of installation

· Anytime anywhere access to the corporate network

· Huge reduction in expenditure on IT infrastructure

· Scalability for on-demand resources

· Facilitates instant deployment of new servers

· On-demand Compute and Storage facility

By providing such a secure environment, the cloud computing providers help enterprises in controlling,

building value, and leveraging the power of private and public clouds

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