Eyes on the sky (continue from previous post)
The opportunities and challenges of migrating to the Cloud.
As result of his decision, Lyman figured that they had saved an average of 1.000 US dollars per employee in hardware and software costs. He further mentioned that since the time they had been using Google’s services, they haven’t had a need to run their Internal mail system and Exchange servers again, buy licenses for such software, or incurred other significant deployment, maintenance and overhead expenses.
In addition to software as a Service (SaaS) several computing storage services exist on the cloud, for instance. Amazon elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), the Rockspace Clud, and Google App Engine. Websites hosted with the help of such services can handle unexpected spikes in traffic by creating and deploying virtual servers for added processing power and load balancing – on demand, with the owners billed per hour of the active server time. The fundamental difference between dedicated hosting and scalable cloud hosting is that, with the latter, you only pay for what you use, and you use only what you need. Whereas with the former, you need to keep in consideration the minimum server power required to handle your highest estimated swell in user traffic and buy that much – which you normally won’t need. Again, the Cloud offers significant savings by letting you skip the initial investment required to initiate minimum server power.
Cloud computing tutorial
On the flip side
It is not all rainbows and butterflies; cloud computing faces fifty criticism as well. The data security issue is a common reason cited for the reluctance shown in embracing cloud computing as it means your data – personal data backup or business e-mail or documents – to online companies in complete confidence. For cloud computing, much of the security issue revolves around trust and customer relationships. You need to be sure that these companies can protect your data from any unauthorized access or tampering.
Organizations that deal with sensitive customer data, such as insurance agencies, hospitals or financial institutions, should of course, think twice before moving to the Cloud. For many years, businesses have relied on third-party sources for data storage and backup needs. Despite the fact that a small-scale business can not provide the same level of data security and redundancy as one that specializes in hosting and storage services; conventional wisdom proves that a local server setup is safer than, say an Amazon or Rackspace data center. Although it is easier for someone to break into an office building to steal data rather than infiltrating an Amazon server farm, remote storage still scares off people.
