little that you cannot do with it. Most companies use the cloud on a PAYG (pay as you
go) basis, paying only for what they need as a way of reducing costs.
Cloud Computing And Business
It doesn’t matter whether you run applications that allow photos to be shared among
millions of smartphone users or whether you are providing support to some of your
more critical business operations, cloud computing allows fast access to IT resources
that are both low cost and incredibly flexible. There is no need for huge payments
upfront to invest in hardware or in the management of that hardware. Instead, with
cloud computing, you simply determine exactly how much and what type of resources
you require and provision them. There are no limits to how many resources you can
access, it is virtually instant and you pay only for what you have used.
There is no doubt that cloud computing makes things much easier for businesses. No
longer do they need that heavy infrastructure or need to own their own data center;
instead, they simply rent what they need – processing power, applications, storage and
so on, from a cloud computing service provider. Front-end costs are much lower with
the company paying only for what they need; as they grow, so their usage can grow with
full flexibility and on demand. Not only that, the business is no longer responsible for
any updates or maintenance as that is all down to the service provider.
There are two types of cloud – public and private. Companies are not responsible for the
upkeep of the public cloud whereas, with a private cloud, the maintenance is down to
the business and is located at the physical location as on-premises or remotely at a data
center. Private clouds tend to be more for sensitive data as they are more secure.
Today a popular solution is the combination of the public and private cloud, with the
advantage of workload distribution for better performance. This is called a hybrid cloud.
There is also a variation of a community cloud, with cloud solutions created and
maintained by several organizations in collaboration with one another.
How Cloud Computing Works
Every cloud computing service works in a different way but where most of them seem to
come together is in the user-friendly dashboard they provide, browser-based and easy
for both developers and IT professionals alike to find and order what resources they
need and carry out account management. Some of these services also work with a
command line interface and with REST APIS, providing developers with several options
to choose from.
The way it works is actually very simple and cost-effective. Instead of businesses having
to fork out for expensive hardware or rent that hardware from another data center, they