Cloud computing, which is often referred to as simply “Cloud” is basically the practice of using a network which is hosted by remote servers on the internet and is widely used to store, access, manage, exchange and process data on the Internet itself instead of using a local server or a personal computer. It is something without which life would have been much more difficult regardless of one’s lifestyle, economic status, profession and educational background. In today’s world, if one has data then cloud computing must be in his or her practice.
The tech giant IBM referred to cloud computing as “Cloud computing is the delivery of on-demand computing resources — everything from applications to data centers — over the internet on a pay-for-use basis.” IBM also mentioned that with the cloud, the resources are much more elastic as it’s faster to meet the demands of the clients, payments are made only for the space that is being used, and nothing extra and cloud offers self-service facilities so that the clients can take the necessary items from the cloud.
The tech giant clearly mentioned the benefits of the cloud-based applications or as popularly called software as a service (SaaS), and the most interesting feature of this is that even if the computer breaks down or loses all data, cloud stores them all, and it can be accessed from anywhere around the world from any remote locations. Another important feature of SaaS is that the creating an account is made free of cost and fast.
Experts and tech giants divide cloud into three types as public cloud, private cloud, and hybrid cloud.
Public Cloud
Public Clouds are defined to be owned and operated by companies that offer rapid access to an affordable computing resource over a public network. The interesting feature of public cloud services is that the users don’t need to invest much in purchasing hardware, software or supporting infrastructure and the providers themselves manage it.
Private Cloud
Experts define private cloud as an infrastructure which is operated totally by a single organization, and it can be managed both by a third party as well as internally. This type of cloud is hosted either internally or externally. This system is more automated type of management function where there is a resource pool for everything from computing, the capability to storage, analytics, and middleware. It offers an interface which is self-service and is employed in controlling services allowing its staff to quickly provision, allocate and deliver on-demand IT resources. Private cloud computing is designed for the specific need of a company, giving it much-secured governance.
Hybrid Cloud
As the name suggests, a hybrid cloud is a form of cloud which uses private cloud foundation combined with the strategic integration and uses public cloud services. Experts informed that the private cloud cannot exist in isolation from the rest of the company’s IT resources and the public cloud and therefore most companies created hybrid clouds. The hybrid cloud offers some amazing benefits which offer the companies to keep their sensitive data in the traditional data center or private clouds, or anyone they prefer. This system allows the companies to take advantage as laaS for the elastic virtual resources and public cloud resources like SaaS for the latest applications and facilitates more deployment models and more portability options. Global statistics suggested that the adoption of this type of cloud grew three times in the last years.
Security is a major concern in Cloud computing
For any company, cloud data security should be the top priority irrespective of what kind of cloud it is. Some of the common threats that cloud computing faces are; data breaches, data loss, insecure interfaces or APIs, account or service traffic hijacking, denial of service, malicious insiders, abuse of cloud services, insufficient due diligence and shared technology vulnerabilities. The nature of the cloud remains dynamic and more the dynamic, more is the increase in the need for automated, agile and elastic approach than the traditional security measures.
Whatever the type of cloud is, the security of cloud is an extremely important thing, and the most well known companies which provide cloud and cloud-based security services are IBM Dynamic Cloud Securities, CipherCloud, Bitium, McAfee Cloud Security, MyPermissions, Netskope, Skyhigh Networks, SafeNet, and Snoopwall.
As stated in a report, 60% of engineering professionals and organizations confirm that the main reason behind slowing down in cloud adoption plans is the lack of security skills. The countries like Japan, Gulf Coast Council (GCC) which includes Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates and Mexico are the ones who are in need of cloud security specialists. These are the countries where IT solution provider companies should focus the most and make new investments to start their ventures of cloud computing.
An official survey indicated that the Australia and Canada are leading the world in public cloud adoption whereas the Gulf Coast Council is leading the globe in private cloud adoption. Yet, GCC is in urgent need of security skills. So GCC must be on the top most priority list where investments can be made by IT solution provider companies.
