Wednesday, May 8, 2013

A Look At Cloud Service Providers

By Mona Moody


One of the economic sectors with the greatest degree of changing technology is the communication industry. Cloud service providers have seen an increase in demand for their services after corporations started realizing the power of clouds in enhancing customer interaction. In this era of computer integration in the corporate sector, it is paramount that firms be prepared to change to remain competitive in the economy.

The concept of cloud computing is still in the developmental stages and much has to be learned about how to use it efficiently. It is essentially a model that enables sharing of a pool of computing resources while managing access and starvation issues. This calls for a system that will be able to handle user requests without the need for human assistance.

A customer wishing to use cloud services should be able to access the shared resources from any node connected to the system without regard to the user application being run. Due to the transparency employed in these networks, the customer always gets the impression that he is accessing resources located at his node. The best systems will also have an element of access control to promote data authenticity issues.

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.

Based on the access rights defined for a particular cloud, various deployment models result. A private cloud is only accessible to entities of an organization which claims ownership of the resources located at their premises or at a separate location. In some instances, they may be run by a third party just like collocation services.

A community cloud is jointly accessed by members of organizations that have pulled together to establish such facilities for their joint benefit. The public category is free for all with credits for its maintenance going to business, academic and governmental organizations. A more recent addition is the hybrid cloud which merges the above two to serve consumer needs.

The idea of a mainframe serving thin clients was established in the late fifties and has played a significant role in the development of present day architectures. These forms of distribution are associated with better efficiency, performance and reliability in the event of accidental data loss. Maintenance operations also tend to be less hectic in contrast to a setting where applications to be checked are installed on each computer in a network. With distribution, firms can take advantage of favorable business environments in a distant location.

Cloud service providers always find themselves under attacks from groups concerned about the security of data on transit. Various techniques of encryption have been tried to thwart the effort of system hackers. So large is the insecurity issue that terms such as malicious insiders, bug developers and password eavesdroppers have been coined. Nevertheless, this technology is bound to grow in popularity as the usage of computers is on the rise.




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