What is the basic difference between when we buy a car and when we rent ? It is that when we buy a car we look after it , we have to maintain it .In the same way , earlier when we needed to host a website we use to purchase server stacks and we needed to maintain the servers during the peak traffic time . But now ,all we can do is just buy them ,use them when we need them and return them when we dont need them. It is just like taking a car on rent using it and then giving it back without taking pains of its maintenance and buying it again on rent when its required.
This what cloud computing is and it is the era of cloud computing . Nowdays what all ITs companies are doing is they would’nt go ahead and invest huge amount of money in its IT infrastructure and buying high end personal computers for its staff members, then it would cost a fortune and the initial investment might give a lot of burden to the company.What they can simply doing is getting the cloud servers and leave all their IT loads over there. Also, to host a lot of load of personal work over there and can work with a cheaper and basic hardware onsite.
The most important benefit of cloud computing is that ,data stored at cloud serves can be accessed form anywhere ,anytime around the word with any device with an internet connection.As the industries are evolving ,we need more data storage and computational power , we need fast and reliable servers.The wiki definition says “Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage and computing power, without direct active management by the user.”We can have unlimited data storage access and computational power in few minutes by just having a internet connection , and contacting a cloud service provider and selecting out the required preferred service. Just like out data is our homes is stored in our hard drives in our pc , in the same way data in the cloud is stored in huge data centers near us and around the world. These data centers contains racks and racks of servers and drives. Our information may be on only one drive on one of those servers, or it could be split across several drives.
The benefits of cloud computing includes , backup , recovery and security of our data .The data is well secure , Data Centers manage these servers to keep the data safe and secure to access. Its scalable too , its just the electricity meter in our house , the days we are watching television 24/7 we pay more electricity bill and the days we are having examination we pay less. In the same way we pay till we use the cloud services , when we return it there is no need to pay. Pay for what you use.
In simple words cloud computing can be called as abstraction and it has become the need of the IT industry.
Shristi uniyal 