Learn what cloud computing is, types, benefits, applications of cloud computing, and how does cloud computing work.
What Is Cloud Computing?
Cloud computing delivers services like servers, data storage, networking, analytics, and more using the internet to deliver rapid innovation and adaptable resources. One who accepts cloud computing can access data and applications online using the internet and does not need to make, operate, and manage them on their servers.
Cloud computing in simple words the delivery of computing services—including servers, storage, databases, networking, software, analytics, and intelligence — over the Internet (aka cloud) to offer faster innovation, flexible resources, and economies of scale.
How Does Cloud Computing Work?
Being an application-based software infrastructure, cloud computing stores data on remote servers that can be accessed by using the internet. Let’s understand how cloud computing works by dividing it into front-end and back-end.
1. Front-end
A user can access the data stored in the cloud with the help of a cloud computing software or by using an internet browser through the front-end.
2. Back-end
The back-end is the chief component of cloud computing responsible for securely storing the data and relevant information. The back-end comprises computers, databases, servers and central servers. The central servers follow the set of rules known as protocols, facilitating the operations. The software, known as middleware, ensures seamless connectivity between the connected devices linked through cloud computing.
The service providers of cloud computing maintain multiple copies of the data to overcome the issues of a data breach, security threats, data loss, etc.
It is easier to work away from the office, thus making it easier for users to access the data anytime and anywhere. Users can also edit documents by working in parallel with other users.
📌 Relevant read: Prerequisites to become a cloud computing engineer
What Are The Types of Cloud Computing?
There are various types of Cloud technology. They are listed below:
1. Public clouds
The end-user does not own public clouds. They are the cloud environments that are created by the IT Infrastructure. It is a Cloud Deployment Model where a provider owns and operates computing resources shared across the multiple tenants using the internet.
The largest cloud providers are IBM Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Alibaba Cloud, Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud.
2. Private Clouds
Private Clouds are solely dedicated to a group or single end-user where the user or group’s firewall controls and runs the cloud environment. When there is complete isolated access to a single customer by the underlying IT infrastructure, that cloud becomes a private cloud. Now organizations build private clouds on vendor-owned data centers located off-premises, thus making obsolete location and ownership rules. This has resulted in private cloud subtypes like managed private clouds and dedicated clouds.
Managed private clouds: These are a cloud delivery option which helps the enterprises having understaffed and unskilled IT teams by providing infrastructure and better cloud services.
Dedicated clouds: A cloud within another cloud is termed a dedicated cloud. A dedicated cloud can be on a public cloud or a private cloud.
3. Hybrid Clouds
A hybrid cloud is a single IT environment created from multiple environments connected via Local Area Networks(LANs), Virtual Private Networks(VPNs), and APIs. The applications run in a combination of different environments. A hybrid cloud is an IT infrastructure that connects at least one private cloud and one public cloud. Providing application portability between them creates a single and flexible optimal cloud environment to run a company’s computing workloads.
4. Multi clouds
It is a Cloud approach made up of one cloud service and from more than one cloud vendor that can be public or private. When multiple clouds are connected by integration, they become hybrid clouds. It can be a combination of both public and private clouds, two or more public clouds or two or more private clouds to achieve the end goals of the enterprise.
📌 Relevant read: Top cloud computing skills in demand for career scope
Benefits of Cloud Computing
There are many advantages of cloud computing. Whether there is a natural disaster, power failure or crisis, your data will be backed up and protected in a safe and secure location. You can quickly reaccess your data and conduct your business as usual without any loss in productivity, which also minimizes downtime.
Some of the key advantages are listed below:
- Cost savings
- Data Security
- Flexibility
- Sustainability
- Insight
- Quality control
- Efficiency
- Strategic value
- Recovery of Disaster
- Loss prevention
- Increased collaboration
- Automatic software update
- Unlimited data storage
Application of Cloud Computing
Because of the benefits and scope of of cloud computing, it is widely used to improve the ability to achieve any business objectives.
- Online data storage to keep and manage large amounts of data
- Cloud computing provides the best option for data backup and recovery.
- Products can quickly test on the cloud against many users.
- Cloud computing is used in medical fields to remotely store data and access data.
- Big data analysis needs a large amount of data, and cloud computing enables us to store this large amount of big data sets, including structured and unstructured data from various sources and sizes.
- Entertainment firms can use cloud computing to reach their clients using a multi-cloud approach.
- Cloud storage enables social media applications to store large amounts of data, cost-effective analytics and data backup and recovery.
- Cloud-based antivirus software stores information about viruses on cloud storage and not in the system.
📌 Further resources on cloud computing:
- Security risks of cloud computing technology and their solutions
- Best cloud computing books to read
- In demand cloud computing research topics
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