A Review on Cloud Computing: Concepts and Benefits

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According to Sugang (302), cloud computing is a detailed technology that involves the use of mid-remote server and Internet to uphold data and other applications. This technology allows businesses and other users to make use of this application without installing it.

Also, they can access their documents using any computer with Internet access (Rodriguez 5). Information that can be offered by a digital system is provided inform of a service using the cloud computing technology. Consumers have the right to use this service without the knowledge on how to manage the resources that are involved.

Examples of cloud computing include, Rediffmail, Gmail, Yahoo mail, Ovimail, Hotmail among others. The consumer only requires Internet access and a computer to start receiving and sending mails.

Cloud computing consumers and businesses do not have the ownership of the physical infrastructure but they rent from the provider or a third party to avoid masses. They use resources and pay for what they have consumed (Parker 386).

There are several types of cloud computing. One of them is software, which is used as a service. Software as service is the most popular form of cloud computing among the users. It provides all the functions of a complicated traditional application to consumers and eliminates customer doubts about application of a server, storage and application development.

Examples are, Yahoo, Google Gmail and applications. The second type of cloud computing is Paas (Platform as a service). This type delivers virtualized server throughout all users and businesses. Also, it can develop new applications and run those existing without doubt on how to maintain the operating system or computing capacity (Sugang 309).

The known providers are Google maps, ADP payroll processing, and U.S. service offering. The third type is the IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service). It provides networks or grids and system software in a multitenant architecture. IaaS is designed to increase the uses of a complete data center.

It reduces costs of the period and expenses involved in capital, though, configuration costs and management tasks are performed concurrently. Vendors are IBM, Amazon.com and other IT suppliers.

Cloud Computing Deployment Models and Concepts

According to Rodriguez (7), several organizations establish community cloud to have common requirements and need to share infrastructure to understand the benefits and aspires to assemble ideologies of a digital ecosystem with the use of a cloud computing. The few users share the cost and are therefore more expensive option as compared to public cloud.

Management and control of Public cloud unlike community clouds are at datacenters that belongs to the service provider where customers share the costs. This kind of model helps to reduce costs. There is low visibility and control in a public cloud than in a private cloud because the service provider owns the underlying infrastructure.

The resources are vigorously provisioned on a self service basis through the Internet or from a third party provider who does billing on a self service basis. Because of the high management the public clouds are cost-efficient because the consumer pays for the resources consumed (Sugang 309).

They also give programmatic approach to compute resources that helps to scale resources automatically without personal intervention and this assists in making business lively. Therefore, consumers and business can take improvement of public clouds services maximize their profits (Sugang 309).

Hybrid cloud combines two or more clouds either public and private or private and community or any other cloud that ruins distinctive entities but are hurdled together by advancement in technology that facilitates data storage and application.

Private cloud describes the concepts that deploy cloud computing on private networks. They provide the benefits of shared hardware costs, the capability to recover from failed data and the ability to scale upon the demand.

Benefits of Cloud Computing

Cost

Parker (397) identified that cloud computing can reduce the cost of acquiring, delivering, and maintaining high computing power. This is a major benefit during periods of financial uncertainty. It enables business and other user to purchase only the needed computing services. Instead of wasting money by investing in very expensive Infrastructures, users can use the extra cost to maintain, develop, and test new and existing systems.

Another benefit accruing from cloud computing is access to high computing and storing devices (Aljabre 235).Through such services, cloud computing plays a major role in facilitating timework initiatives and bolster an agency continuity of operation.

The other benefit is Scale and capacity whereby cloud computing helps users to scale the consumption to suite their desired needs. This means that information technology equipments can be expanded without any changes to capital investment.

Maximization of cloud computing resources can overcome the challenge of information technology resources most important for users who have the shortage of IT specialist. Other benefits are customization and collaboration.

What Cloud Computing Does

Rodriguez (5) confirms that the use of Cloud computing improves business value which is to maximize profits while reducing cost. Cloud computing has helped in various ways to achieve this objective. For instance, Amazon brings together different players in the market, customers, and vendors meet together to discuss ideas and trade in business without any delay.

Given that market players can have access to the cloud business activities can be conducted effectively. The use of cloud computing can give a business competitive advantage over its competitors therefore improving its value. The shared access by market players shortens the time to access the market.

Amazon does not require specific amount of capital to be invested and therefore proving very low services, it also allows the users to only pay for services they have consumed therefore facilitating convenient ways of payment (Parker 386).

How Can It Change The Way We Work Or Contact Our Business?

Cloud computing creates flexible and efficient online business for customers, vendors, and partners. Due to its functions and flexibility, a business venture can perform multiple functions, respond and adapt quickly to any changes in the business environment leading to benefits of faster growth in revenues, cost reduction, and efficient management of perils and reputational threats.

The business venture is accessible worldwide by customers connected to the internet and it therefore reduces the time and cost involved in marketing. Cloud computing helps in improvement of internal operations of business to be most efficient and of high quality and externally helps to incorporate marketing channels.

Through cloud computing cost in business operations is reduced because no physical infrastructure or capital expenses will be involved. Therefore, it means that there will be no more high cost servers, storage equipments or hiring of expensive IT staff.

The company have to identify which business needs its services and products and if possible to offer services to the consumers through online cloud computing applications. Incase there are many employees, a business will just need an Internet connection and all employees will be able to share files, applications, and printers. It is also applicable where a business has multiple workstations and need interlinking together.

Employees can therefore share word document with other user creating a simple networking that saves time. A simple connection of computers to the Internet also reduces the costs of hiring more employees in a business and therefore marketing cost, space, and time is reduced. This contributes to business competitive advantage.

A good example is Amazon cloud computing, which is able to reduce cost in several ways, especially when a business begins to make losses during hard economic times, cloud computing not only serves as a tool to reduce costs but also increases profits, bring better relations with customers and remain inline with technological advancements.

Amazon EC2 can compute cloud web services that can reduce cooling cost and power, cost of server administration, and costs of management. Therefore, this reduction in costs in a business venture reduces the space and energy needed to run the same business (Aljabre 235).

Cloud computing helps employees in a business organization to collaborate consequently improving productivity. Collaboration is the cooperative arrangement between two or more parties to work jointly towards achievement of a common goal.

It helps to identify and react very fast to the new opportunities that add value to the organization. The cost of communication between employees reduces because employees are working together and creates a positive direct impact through direct travel cost.

Good environment is created and the business venture can retain customers for a very long-time because of the high collaborative approach between employees and customers, and this ensures customers fulfillment and loyalty (Parker 386).

Through employee collaboration, they can connect, manage, and access less expensive labor. Therefore, cloud computing increases a competitive advantage of business, and it retain its employees for a very long-time as well as customers.

Cloud computing increases convenience in billing because billing details are available to the service provider and also help in checking costs. Sharing of costs and infrastructure ensures low expenses and faster availability of services.

Also, it increases the speed and levels of scale whereby business venture no longer need to invest in purchasing and setting up the hardware and other resources needed for new application. Depending on market demand they can scale up and down according to the demands in the market.

During times of high activities like launching of sales campaigns cloud services are more reliable (Aljabre 235). Cloud computing can also help in attracting and retaining top talents, creating a culture of involvement, motivating, and increasing satisfaction.

Superficially it can attract and retain high quality suppliers,customers,investors, and business partners. This in turn increases external stakeholders’ satisfaction, their engagement, and their loyalty.

Where Can I Get From?

Google

This cloud provider is among the top 10 service providers of cloud computing. Apart from cloud computing, it is associated with Internet analysis and advertising technology, web application, browser, and operating system development.

Two graduate students who met at Stanford University founded Google in 1995. In 1996 the two students Brin and Page collaborated to do a research project that finally came to be the Google search engine. It was called backrub because of the analysis of back links and encouraged many students to develop interest in the university research community.

Despite of many challenges, the founders gathered enough funds to get started. In September 1998, they began operations. Google’s mission was to systematize the globe’s information and succeed in making it collectively valuable and reachable. Google search engine received major competition from Yahoo, Excite, and Layos during its initial stages of operation. Its headquarters are in Mountain view, California.

Amazon

This is a web service designed to make a web scale to compute fast for web developers. The design of Amazon resizes computable capacity in the cloud and allows configuration of capacity with very low friction.

It reduces the time required to wader and purchase new server instances to proceedings and provides the user with full control of computing resources, to scuttle on Amazon established computing environment.

It cuts down on economies of scale by letting end users to compensate for materials or resources utilized and offer platform to fabricate failed applications and segregates the consumer from regular breakdown scenarios. Compared to other providers, the users of Amazon can have complete control of all the occurrences. It is elastic and flexible (Sugang 309).

Nephoscale

This cloud provider offers all new users an opportunity to host free clouds starter packages that include cloud storage and computing. The main reason of starter packages is to help the user to save time and money in deployment and development of applications and is successful way of becoming well-known with Nephoscale time reducing features and developing of infrastructure cloud services.

All new users are fit to deploy at least 256MB RAM free cloud server and get the first five million dollars for one year. The cloud storage and free cloud server can be used to examine or swarm web applications, evaluate interface, and steer the Nephoscale client portal. This is possible through the cloud script that used rapidly to manage cloud infrastructures (Rodriguez 5).

Joyent

This service provider purposely focuses on technology from the ground to provide a great flexible, resilient, and high performance for customers and their applications that were important for customer to realize to realize great value in cloud-based computing.

The joyent technology are in eliminating complexity and make dynamic adjustments for its customers through; the smartplatform,smartdatacenter, and smartmachine.Joyent believes that a business should spend money on resources that help to differentiate and improve their businesses (Maheswaran 9).

The driving force to business improvement is software and therefore Joyent has developed Smart Technologies to overcome the challenges associated with management of software and hardware in cloud environments. Using smart technologies, Joyent provides a more responsible and dynamic environment that accommodates growth with minimal management requirement for the user.

With sizing and capacity reduced, business can focus on developing applications. Joyent flexibility is also manifested in several deployment options that are available for business and customers and can use installed, configured software packages from a third party.

Either a user can choose from existing software packages for Linux or UNIX operating systems or can either build originally using new applications languages, such as Java, Python, and Rails (Rodriguez 5).

Costs Associated With the Use of Cloud Computing

Moving and Storing Data

According to Rodriguez, “businesses use thousands of dollars in moving and storing of large volumes of data to public clouds for long period of time” (5). An article by senior director of IT and operations at White pages Inc. stated that one time move of data can cost thousands of dollars. Most cloud providers charge uploading and downloading fees. There is also internal labor costs involved in the same even if data systems are offsite.

Most users are not aware of labor cost charged but as users of cloud computing scales up to handle a huge workload complexities emerge on how to manage the increasing number of cloud instances. “Another cost involved is one for storing long-term data in the cloud and considering the growing data rates over the next two years, the life cycle cost can be very high” (Rodriguez 5).

Other cost involved is that of testing the software before moving to the cloud that might result into unexpected cost for debugging and testing a vendor application and cost of integrating application from multiple vendors (Rodriguez 5).

Cloud computing is an expensive undertaking. It costs millions of dollars to business people, especially concerning different vendors. Nevertheless, the quality of services matches the value of money of customers. The costs are compelling but inexpensive when compared to the risk the transition costs to a compute cloud in the external to benefit the medium earning businesses.

Increase in competition in the market has reduced the prices for this service (Burford 5).The service providers are focusing on creating a substantial market share to increase sales. Amazon has already lowered its prices to meet the rising demand for cloud computing. The decrease was by 30%; that is 4.3 cents per hour for scratch storage and computing power. This is shown in the table below.

New Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances Pricing as of August 2009.

(Source: Pricing of Amazon EC2 Reserved, Hinchcliffe 1).

The costs of long-term use of the services require different methods of payment. The customers use different features, such as S3. The customer can pay according to hours, months, or annually. Large data storage can cost $5 per hour or $38000 annually (Rodriguez 6). The pricing by two companies is as shown bellow.

Microsoft Azure Cloud Computing Price Model as of Mid-2009.

(Source: Pricing of Microsoft Azure, Hinchcliffe 1)

Google Application Engine Pricing Model of Aug 2009.

(Source: Pricing of Google Application Engine, Hinchcliffe 1)

From the above analysis, it can be concluded that Amazon is currently a cheaper cloud provider for applications that need over 6.5hrs of CPU per day (Rodriguez 9). Amazon is currently the most experienced, and this gives it a competitive advantage due to its low charges and maturity.

Windows charges 20% more than Amazon to use the cloud. However, Microsoft and Amazon offers similar prices while Google app engine does not compute windows to the cloud.GAE offers the most convenient cloud computing services because it requires the user only to pay for the services consumed (Aljabre 278).

Competitors

Rodriguez (13) explains that in any business there must be threats and risks involved. In cloud computing business, competition in cloud hosting prices is the major threat that players in the market are facing.

Many companies in the market are providing cheap priced packages and many others are laying strategies to provide low priced packages. (Aljabre 282). This aggressiveness is bringing influence into the business world.

Competition in cloud hosting prices is reducing profit margins, returns on investment is taking long therefore creating pressure. The only way to overcome such kind of competition is acquiring a bigger market share.

Positive impact is improvements in better quality, efficient delivery of services and high attendance to customer needs. Maheswaran (11) adds that to maintain fair competition between the players in the market and ensure better service delivery, authorities have put in place standards that any new entrant should conform to.

This touches on the issues of security, transparency, and accountability together with conformance to service agreements of governance.

Works Cited

Aljabre, Abdul-Aziz. Cloud computing for increased business value. International Journal of Business and Social Science 3.1 (2012): 234-239.

Burford, David. “Cloud computing: a brief introduction.” LAD Enterprises Inc. 2010. Web.

Hinchcliffe, Dion. “.” Ebuz. 2009. Web.

Maheswaran, M. “.” CUSAT. 2008. Web.

Parker, Joshua. Lost in the cloud: protecting end-user privacy in federal cloud computing contracts. Public Contract Law Journal 41.2 (2012): 385-409.

Rodriguez, Alex. “Not all clouds are created equal.” An Expedient Communications White Paper in Cloud Computing Services. 2010. Web.

Sugang, Ma. A review on cloud computing development. Journal of Networks 7. 2 (2012): 305-310.

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