Table of Contents
Infrastructure as a Service
Cloud services enable various businesses to outsource their information infrastructure and needs. With cloud services, a given organization may be able to conduct operations across a broad geographical area with the flexibility of carrying out transactions from any device that can connect to the cloud. There are three types of cloud services. The infrastructure as a service provides organizations with the hardware necessary to implement their information system; this may include servers (Baun, 2011). Platform as a service whereby on top of the hardware, software such as databases, web and file servers, hypervisors and others are provided, and the organization may implement their system on top of the platform as per their needs. The software as a service model provides agencies with fully implemented and operational information systems ready to be used by a given body.
The leading cloud service provider is the Amazon Web Services, the cloud department of Amazon incorporated (Chopra, 2017). The service is offered through Amazon’s extensive data center infrastructure which ensures high performance, scalability and reliability. The service is provided to the organization on the usage basis, that is, the client is charged according to some resources allocated to some computing resources needed. For instance, if an organization requires additional storage for increased applications, additional storage may be assigned to the organization with a corresponding increase in charges (Chopra, 2017). The client has the flexibility of increasing or reducing computing resources allocated to them according to their needs. There are no software packages and or software support offered with this package.
The Google Compute Engine, provided by search giant Google, is most suitable for big data applications and warehousing. The Infrastructure as a service package from Google provides high speed, highly scalable and reliable platform that is available from most places on the planet. Though it is Infrastructure as a service, Google bundles and supports various software applications for free and discounted rates depending on the application. Organizations may get a variety of software services ranging from office documents to machine learning platforms that are scalable and available (Breeding, 2012). The Google computing engine also offers redundancy and backup solutions that ensure that data and services are available despite failures at given points.
With the advent of distributed computing technology and the ever-increasing computing power of server computers, businesses are now able to outsource their information system and focus on their main businesses. In cloud computing, the service provider leverages on scores of clients and establish high scale, low latency server farms or data centers to scale to the information needs of their customers (Baun, 2011). Cloud computing offers various advantages and benefits to businesses. An organization saves resources that would have otherwise been used to procure and maintain hardware and or software. The risks and responsibilities associated with hosting the information system in the house are transferred to the service provider. Due to the distributed nature of cloud computing, data can be reliably stored and retrieved at any given period regardless of any loss or damage to the original copy. Cloud computing services also offer businesses the flexibility of choosing devices that may be able to work with the services, Most devices that can connect to a server may also be used to handle various aspects of the business that are hosted in the cloud.
- Baun, C. (2011). Cloud Computing: Web-Based Dynamic IT Services. Heidelberg: Springer.
- Breeding, M. (2012). Cloud Computing. London: Facet.
- Chopra, R. (2017). CLOUD COMPUTING. Sidney: Mercury Learning & Inform