Cloud Computing

Cloud computing has been the buzz word of recent years. While below information shall seem to be very preliminary for the enlightened netizen, there are many of us caught up in maintaining physical servers and this is a primer for them. Some of the information might seem as not strictly correct but to help the early entrant, some analogy has been provided to help them understand cloud computing.
In layman terms, Cloud computing is a technology that uses the internet and central remote servers to maintain data and applications. Cloud computing allows consumers and businesses to use applications without installation and access their personal files at any computer with internet access. This technology allows for much more efficient computing by centralizing storage, memory, processing and bandwidth.

Cloud Computing Types

Public Cloud
Public or External cloud describes cloud computing in the traditional mainstream sense, whereby resources are dynamically provisioned on a fine-grained, self-service basis over the Internet, via web application/web services, from an off-site third-party provider who shares resources and bills on a fine-grained utility computing basis.

Hybrid Computing
A hybrid cloud environment consists of multiple internal and/or external providers and it is typical for most enterprises.

Private cloud
Private Cloud and Internal Cloud are neologism that some vendors have recently used to describe offerings that emulate cloud computing on private networks. These (typically virtualization network) products claim to “deliver some benefits of cloud computing without the pitfalls”, capitalizing on data security, corporate governance, and reliability concerns.

Private Clouds are for competitive solutions that lock customers into proprietary technology stacks, cloud computing is designed for the heterogeneous reality of most IT environments, giving users the freedom and flexibility to create and manage private clouds which support all leading hypervisors, operating systems and hardware platforms. Private cloud is an internal service-oriented IT environment optimized for performance and cost that is deployed inside a customer’s data center. Powered by products including Windows Server® and Microsoft® System Center® family of products, private clouds are typically deployed to be compatible with existing applications while using cloud principles like elasticity, scalability and chargeback proportional to use.

Virtual private cloud is a technique for extending our organizational trust boundaries over a series of resources regardless of their deployment. It builds off the basic concept of a virtual private network (VPN), but is a more robust networking concept that lets us define and control addressing, topology, protocols, and encrypted communications for instances deployed to cloud computing platforms.

We look at creating a portfolio of cloud resources, composed of public, internal, and hosted cloud deployments linked together with traditional deployments via virtual private cloud. We also look for ways to optimize—and automate—the deployment and management of your business services where most appropriate based on the application requirements and business/IT policies. We craft a strategy that streamlines deployment expenses in much the same way that you optimize your Web application/site deployment. The ultimate goal is to speed IT service delivery while reducing costs.

Few benefits of cloud deployments:

o Reduce computing costs
o Reduce infrastructure footprint
o Achieve a more flexible computing environment
o Map capacity to demand (no under- or over-provisioning – buy only what’s needed)
o Decouple applications from infrastructure constraints
o Ensure capacity is there when you need it
o Scale servers on the fly and on demand
o 1 to 100 servers in minutes
o Choose server size and pay for what you use
o Accessible via online control panel and open API
o Fully customizable with root directory access.
o No minimum commitments or contracts
What we offer in cloud
• Cloud enablement of traditional application, we are one of top ten companies in world to successfully to be certified as HP CI ready for our application.
• Private secured cloud deployment for banks, financial institutions, brokers having sensitive data.
• High availability cloud deployments on site or off site.